“We’re All in This Photo” – Blue Ghost Sends New Photos of Earth from the Moon’s Surface

The Blue Ghost spacecraft of the American company Firefly Aerospace has successfully landed on the Moon. Despite the fact that the event took place only a few hours ago, the device has already transmitted the first impressive images to Earth, including shots of our planet captured from the lunar surface.

Image source: Firefly

Firefly began publishing images some time after Blue Ghost landed today at 11:34 Moscow time. It landed on the visible side of the Moon near Mount Latreille in the Sea of ​​Crisium, a huge crater that is 550 km wide in some places. It was noted that the device made a precise landing just 100 meters from the target area, for which two maneuvers were performed.

«”It’s an incredibly challenging engineering feat to land anything on the surface of the moon,” NASA spokesman Joel Kearns said during the presentation.

Firefly spacecraft program director Ray Allensworth said the company decided not to broadcast Blue Ghost’s landing live to free up the communications channel to transmit telemetry data and keep several instruments running, including the hazard detection system that helped avoid two boulders during the descent.

«”NASA expected it to be relatively safe, but that doesn’t mean there are no hazards. We were able to navigate around them and land safely,” Allensworth told reporters.

One of the Blue Ghost images taken during the landing shows a distant pale blue dot in the background – our planet. “We are all in this picture,” one panelist said when he first saw the image.

«The next 14 days are going to be very challenging and we’re going to be working to deliver all the science data from all 10 payload instruments, but I’m confident the company can handle it,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim said during a press conference.

The big event will happen on March 14, when Blue Ghost will take high-definition images of a total lunar eclipse, when the Earth blocks out the light from the Sun. At the same time, a total lunar eclipse will be visible from the Earth’s surface, turning our planet’s satellite a deep and eerie red.