Astronomy Picture of the Day
There’s a new lander on the Moon. Yesterday Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost executed the first-ever successful commercial lunar landing. During its planned 60-day mission, Blue Ghost will deploy several NASA-commissioned scientific instruments, including PlanetVac which captures lunar dust after creating a small whirlwind of gas. Blue Ghost will also host the telescope LEXI that captures X-ray images of the Earth’s magnetosphere. LEXI data should enable a better understanding of how Earth’s magnetic field protects the Earth from the Sun’s wind and flares. Pictured, the shadow of the Blue Ghost lander is visible on the cratered lunar surface, while the glowing orb of the planet Earth hovers just over the horizon. Goals for future robotic Blue Ghost landers include supporting lunar astronauts in NASA’s Artemis program, with Artemis III currently scheduled to land humans back on the Moon in 2027.
Full resolution image link
Image Credits: Firefly Aerospace.
Even in this pic you can tell I’ve gained weight
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
— Carl Sagan
My senior year in High School I did this speech for our Senior Program. A few years ago I redid it as a video for a Space Nerd friend. It still is one of my favorite poems(?) speeches(?) whatever it is, it’s timeless and amazing.
I really admired and miss that guy.
That’s a great photo, kudos to them for the landing and the pic!
Shouldn’t Earth seen from the moon appear substantially larger than the moon appears from Earth? Just a weird perspective I guess?
Take a picture of the moon with the horizon sometime. It always appears smaller in the photo.
It would seem bigger, but this is imaged with a wide angle lens. The lander has a lot more cameras, I’m sure we’ll get some better shots of Earth and a nice panorama of the lander’s surroundings in the coming days It’s mission will only last 60 days, so they have a lot to do in a short time.
Stuck the landing!
Onto some payload ops. Hopefully the SCALPSS cameras got good footage of the landing plume. They have a handful of regolith experiments to try out. And LISTER- drill baby drill.
