Last week, between the night of March 13 and the early morning of the 14th, inhabitants of the American continent pointed their cameras towards the sky to capture the lunar eclipse, the so -called ‘Blood Moon’, but there was a camera that was not in America when this happened. Wow, I wasn’t even on earth. It was the Blue Ghost camera, the lunar module that is located on the moon and that could capture a total eclipse from the moon. Of course, from this perspective, it was not a lunar eclipse, but a solar eclipse.
“This is the first time in history that a commercial company actively operates on the moon and can observe a total solar eclipse, in which the earth blocks the sun and projects a shadow on the lunar surface,” said Firefly Aerospace in his mission blog. “This phenomenon occurred simultaneously with the lunar eclipse that we witness on earth.”
The company shared a video of what Blue Ghost captured from its exclusive place in the Mare Crisium.
“These images, quickly captured by our camera on the upper deck with different exhibition settings, joined in a fast clip,” Firefly said in a statement. “The reddish tone is due to the refraction of sunlight through the Earth’s atmosphere, while the sun is blocked by our planet, projecting a shadow on the lunar surface. The bright eclipse ring is observed again in the Blue Ghost solar panel. ”
It should also be noted, at the beginning of the video, the presence of mercury (on the left) and Venus (on the right) above the solar eclipse.
During the five hours that the eclipse lasted, the temperature on the moon descended from 40 ° C to -170 ° C (lacking atmosphere, the moon cannot contain heat). Since the lunar module depends on solar energy for its operation, Blue Ghost had to resort to support batteries to be able to capture this phenomenon. Blue Ghost also operated various instruments to measure changes in the dust and lunar radiation environment during the eclipse.
A historical mission comes to an end
This Monday, March 17, Firefly concluded the Blue Ghost mission, once all its goals have been completed after spending a lunar day, the equivalent of 14 days on Earth, on the surface of our natural satellite. The module still had the opportunity to operate for five hours during the cold lunar night, before disconnecting the transmission forever on March 16.
It was in the early hours of Sunday, March 2, 3:34 am, Eastern time (2:34 am, Mexico City), when Blue Ghost Mission 1 alunicized successfully in the Mare Crisium region (or “sea of crises”), in the vicinity of a mountain called Mons Latreille. To carry out this mission, NASA hired Fireflye for 101 million dollars to undertake its lunar economy initiative through commercial lunar payload services (CLPS).
“After an impeccable landing on the moon, Firefly’s team immediately put themselves to work on the surface to ensure that NASA’s 10 useful charges could capture as many scientific data as possible during the lunar day,” Jason Kim, executive director of Firefly Aerospace, said in a statement.
“We are extremely proud of the demonstrations that Blue Ghost allowed, from the tracking of GPS signals on the moon for the first time to the robotic drilling of the lunar surface at an unprecedented depth. We want to express our most sincere thanks to the NASA clps initiative and the White House administration for serving as a basis for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to facilitate scientific and technological experiments that support future missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond, ”added the CEO of this firm based in Texas.
While the mission has concluded, it remains to be analyzed the 119 GB of information transmitted from the moon to the earth, including 51 GB of scientific data.
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