A four-legged robot from Texas landed squarely on the Moon on 2 March, becoming the first commercial spacecraft to ace a lunar landing. The lander, known as Blue Ghost and built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, aims to spend two weeks conducting science experiments provided by NASA.
Blue Ghost touched down in the Mare Crisium region of the Moon at 2:34 a.m. Texas time. “We’re on the Moon again,” said Vanessa Wyche, the acting associate administrator of NASA in Washington, DC, at a jubilant post-landing press conference.
Other companies have tried to land on the Moon before, but have been lost in space or crashed while attempting to touch down. Last year, the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines managed to land its Odysseus spacecraft, but it hit the ground so hard it broke a leg and tipped on its side.
After launching on 15 January, Blue Ghost appears to have pulled off the complex sequence of autonomous manoeuvres required to approach and land on the Moon. Its first images showed the probe sitting upright on the grey surface, and included an evocative shot of its shadow on the Moon as the Earth gleams in the sky above.
The landing is a much-needed win for NASA’s Commercial Payload Services Program, which began in 2018 when the agency began contracting with aerospace companies to fly scientific instruments to the Moon. Blue Ghost is the third in this series; the fourth, which is the second attempt from Intuitive Machines, aims to land near the lunar south pole on 6 March.
“We are starting to hit our cadence,” said Nicola Fox, head of NASA’s science mission directorate.
Ready for action
The 2-metre-high Blue Ghost is now unfurling and commissioning its science payloads. Among them are a small drill and a ‘planetvac’ to burrow into and scoop the crumbly lunar dirt. Other experiments will study the stickiness of Moon dust, and a way of using electric fields to try to keep spacecraft surfaces free of such dust.
