A lunar sunset captured by the Blue Ghost spacecraft during its final moments. (Photo credit: Firefly Aerospace)
NASA has released the first-ever high-quality photographs of a lunar sunset, marking the end of the first mission of the Blue Ghost lunar module to our rocky satellite.
The image captures a ghostly glow over the cratered lunar horizon.
“These are the first high-resolution images that capture the sun setting and then disappearing into the darkness on the horizon,” Joel Kearns, associate administrator for exploration at NASA, said at a press briefing on Tuesday (March 18).
The lunar lander, developed and operated in partnership with private space exploration company Firefly Aerospace, landed on the moon on March 2. Its mission lasted 14 days — the equivalent of one lunar day — before ending Sunday (March 16). Like most lunar landers, Blue Ghost was not designed to operate in the lunar night — the frigid, roughly two-week period when much of the moon’s visible surface is in shadow and temperatures drop to minus 148 degrees Fahrenheit.
In addition to producing impressive photographs, the lander collected extensive data on how space weather and other space factors can impact our planet. “The teams are looking forward to analyzing their data, and we are extremely excited about the expected scientific discoveries that will be made during this mission,” Cairns said in a statement Tuesday (March 18).
The Blue Ghost lunar lander launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on January 15 as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. The lander delivered 10 science and technology instruments to the Mare Crisium basin on the near side of the moon, which NASA said was the largest payload ever carried by a CLPS mission.
Among those instruments, NASA said, are the deepest robotic subsurface thermal probe ever built, an X-ray thermal imager to study how solar winds interact with Earth's magnetic field, and a subsurface probe that uses electric and magnetic fields to measure depths of up to 700 miles (110 kilometers).
“The science and technology we send to the Moon helps lay the foundation for NASA’s future exploration and long-term human presence to inspire the world for generations to come,” said Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator.
During its short mission, Blue Ghost captured thousands of additional images, including a sunrise on the Moon and a solar eclipse on Earth during last week's “blood moon” lunar eclipse.
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Pandora DewanSocial Link NavigationTrending News Editor
Pandora is the news editor at Live Science. She is also a science anchor and previously worked as a senior science and health reporter at Newsweek. Pandora holds a degree in biological sciences from the University of Oxford, where she specialized in biochemistry and molecular biology.
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