Human beings are again ‘over the moon’, as Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost uncrewed lander touches down on the Moon’s surface, inaugurating one of the busiest seasons of Lunar exploration.
And the private spacecraft is already beaming home spectacular views of Earth from the lunar surface, after its historic landing.
Space.com reported:
“Blue Ghost touched down in Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises), after deftly performing two hazard avoidance maneuvers and achieving a precision landing within 328 feet (100 meters) of its target zone near the volcanic feature Mons Latreille.
‘This is an incredibly challenging technical feat to pull off, to land, anything on the surface of the moon,’ Joel Kearns, Deputy Associate Administrator for exploration in NASA Science Mission Directorate said during the press conference.”
We’re baaack!
Blue Ghost has landed, safely delivering 10 NASA scientific investigations and tech demos that will help us learn more about the lunar environment and support future astronauts on the Moon and Mars. pic.twitter.com/guugFdsXY3
— NASA (@NASA) March 2, 2025
Firefly Aerospace unveiled the first image acquired by the Blue Ghost lunar lander, taken by S-band imagery.
Higher resolution X-band imagery expected in the next few hours when the lander deploys its main antenna.
“Firefly opted to forgo a live video stream of the landing from the Blue Ghost to free up communications bandwidth for telemetry and for several instruments that were in action during the descent, including a critical hazard avoidance system that helped the lander avoid at least two potentially dangerous boulders on the surface, according to Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director.”
Reuters reported:
“Missions like Firefly’s Blue Ghost represent low-budget precursor missions to the moon that will enable research into the lunar environment before the U.S. sends its astronauts there. Firefly has a $101 million NASA contract for the mission.
[…] On Blue Ghost, two onboard instruments will study the lunar soil and its subsurface temperatures in experiments by Honeybee Robotics, a firm owned by Blue Origin, which is developing its own lunar lander to send humans to the moon for NASA’s Artemis program later this decade.
NASA’s Langley Research Center has a stereo camera on board to analyze the lunar dirt plumes kicked up by Blue Ghost’s landing engine, gathering data to help researchers predict the dusty surface material’s dispersal during heavier moon missions in the future.”
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