Shortly after landing, Blue Ghost sent this splendid photo of his shadow with the land above the lunar horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace
The Blue Ghost Lunar Lander ended the surface operations on March 16, 2025, concluding an extraordinary success of a mission. Designed, built and flew by Firefly Aerospace, based near Austin, Texas, Blue Ghost performed an impeccable two -month trip, closed by an extraordinary landing and two weeks of operations at Mare Crisio.
The success of the mission – named Ghost Riders in the Sky, presumably after the success of Johnny Cash of 1979 – is all the more impressive as it was the first attempt of Firefly to land on the moon.
Recent history shows that even 55 years later Apollo, robotic lunar landings are still risky and difficult. Just two weeks ago, the IM-2 intuitive Machines mission based in Houston ended with an accident landing in a crater, the second consecutive landing of the company to go laterally. And the lander from Russia, India, Israel and Japan, everyone has crashed in recent years. (On the other hand, all four Chinese lunar landings have had enormous success and subsequent Indian and Japanese landings have achieved better results.)
Firefly’s success, Out The Gate, is also welcome to NASA, who paid the company $ 93.3 million to provide a suite of scientific useful loads as part of the Agency’s commercial load charge program. Now four CLPS missions are desired, two of which for intuitive machines. Of them, the ghost knights in the sky are the only ones who had fully successful.
A perfect landing for the image
The Lander Blue Ghost covered with 6.6 feet (2 meters) covered with 2.5 meters (3.5 m) cover of 3.5 feet (3.5 m) through the landing legs and has a mass of 3,344 pounds (1,517 kilograms) if completely powered. Fortunately, the lander setting was personally signed by Apollo Moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmidt.
The Ghost Riders in The Sky Mission were managed by the Firefly Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park, near Austin, Texas. Like Texan born and raised, I asked Firefly Aerospace if Blue Ghost wore a Texas flag. Not in this mission, they replied, but future missions will do so. The flag of the solitary star will be among the stars!
After being launched on top of a Falcon 9 rocket on January 15, 2025, Blue Ghost did not go directly to the moon like Apollo missions. Instead, it is slowly spiral on the moon in a lazy trajectory to save energy before falling into the lunar orbit on February 13th. In the following 17 days, the boat slowly lowered in a 62 miles circular orbit (100 km). At 2:34 Central hour, March 2, 2015, the Lander performed a perfect autonomous landing for the image near Mons Latreille on the Crisio of the eastern sea. This 387 miles (620 kilometers) lunar sea on the man in the right cheek of the moon was not explored by NASA and Apollo’s surveyor missions in the last century.
A landing video released by Firefly showed that Blue Ghost’s shadow became visible at an altitude of 91 feet (28 meters) while slowly descending to the surface. Soon, a surprisingly violent swirling storm of swirling dust was mounted by the rocket exhaust has turned into a haze that observes horizon. With a shocking rapidity after the engine closing, the powder quickly settled in the Airless lunar environment to reveal a stone thrown towards the horizon, splashing into the dust to the left of the Lander shadow.
At the time of touchdown, the first of the 10 lunar surface experiments was already a success. The Langley Research Center of NASA provided the stereo cameras for the Surface Studies Lunar Pennacchi (Scalps), a six -cameras suite that recorded 3,000 frames of videos that study how the explosion of the rocket exhaust reacted with free lunar powder and rego. Even half a century after Apollo’s landing, the dynamics of the rocket exhaust that affect the reglite are not completely understood. The scalp experiment is therefore essential to help the landing of Artemide scheduled for the article later in this decade.
A scientific size
As a frequent visitor of the Space Sciences division at the Southwest Research Institute (Swri) in my hometown of San Antonio, I was particularly interested in the lunar experiment Magnetatelluric Sound (LMS) developed by Swri. Magnetotellurics measures the natural variation in surface electric and magnetic fields to determine the ease with which electricity flows through a planetary body. Robert Grimm, the main investigator of the instrument, observed in a statement that scientists have used magnetotellurics on earth for more than 50 years to look for oil, water and other resources, “as well as understanding geological processes such as the growth of continents”.
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A delightful video released by Firefly showed the deployment of the magnetalluric sensors of the size of a softball of LMS. Like an outfielder that launches the winning ball towards the plate, Blue Ghost raised the sensors and their final electric cable for more than 60 feet (18 m) away from the Lander. The LMS experiment should provide insights on how the moon has cooled and how its minerals were distributed in regions and separated layers at a depth of 700 miles (1,120 km) or about two thirds of the moon’s radius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxeb79e5rly
A growing concern for the future lunar exploration is the static effect of lunar powder. The experiment of the electrodynamic of the dust shield has shown an electric technique to sweep away the lunar powder from the vital components of space vehicles.
Another fascinating experiment provided by the Italian Space Agency was the lunar experiment of the receiver GNSS (Lugre) who studied if the signs of the satellite navigation systems such as GPS can also be used to navigate the moon. The Lugre receiver was able to collect signals from the GPS managed by the United States and the European Galileo system both on the road to the moon and from the lunar surface. This shows that the same Satnav signals that allow our smartphones to guide us at the grocery store can also help future lunar explorers to browse the moon’s surface.
After the disappointing cancellation of the Viper mission to the Lunar South Polo and the crash of the intuitive mission that transported the drill, it was nice to see the Ghost cyclists in the sky perform two experiments that touched and championship the lunar surface. Shortly after the landing, the Lunar Planetvac (LPV) experiment prepared by the robotics of Honeybee has successfully shown that the regolite can be collected in a container-interference of a pressurized nitrogen gas. And in a collaboration between Honeybee and Texas Tech University, the lunar instrumentation for the thermal experiment of the subsoil with the rapidity experiment (Lister) has successfully practiced in the lunar reglite to insert a temperature probe. The fascinating video of the perforation operation showed rock chips and sparks was expelled like the bored pneumatic drill on the surface.
It is an envelope
Four days after landing, eight of the 10 planned scientific goals had been achieved and the experiments were broken to help cool the Lander under the midday sun of 250 degrees-Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius). The experiments restarted later on the lunar day when the temperature dropped.
An intriguing event that was not an official scientific objective was the total lunar eclipse of 14/15 March. As can be seen from the Blue Ghost Lander, which then operated on Mare Crisio, this event was a total solar eclipse. A video that radiant from the moon showed that the earth slowly passed in front of the sun, bathing the lander in the disturbing red glow of the penumbral shadow of the earth during the totality. During the 2 hours and 16 minutes of totality, the earth appeared like a ring in the lunar sky while the sunlight was refracted around the limb of our planet by its atmosphere. During the totality, the local temperature at Mare Crisio precipitated from 104 f to –274 F (from 40 C to –170 C).
The Blue Ghost Lander should not survive the lunar night, but its scientific inheritance will continue to make the researchers of the mysteries of the moon reflect for a long time. Firefly’s first impeccable attempt for a lunar landing is a clear contrast with previous commercial failures. The programmed landing of another year of another blue ghost on the Moon’s company will reveal if Firefly’s initial success was the fortune of the beginner or the first flight of a reliable and robust lunar Lander.
