En route to land on the moon, a spacecraft snapped views of Earth eclipsing the sun.
The Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by the Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace for NASA, launched to space on Jan. 15, and is slated to attempt a challenging moon landing on March 2. Now in Earth's orbit, the robotic craft has opportunities to capture poignant solar system imagery.
"Witness Earth eclipsing the Sun from Blue Ghost's top deck — another incredible postcard moment on our trip to the Moon!" Firefly Aerospace recently posted online.
In the short clip below, a time-lapse shows the sun quickly eclipsed as Earth moves between our star and the spacecraft. Just a sliver, or crescent, of the sun is visible, before Earth departs the outer space scene.
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Blue Ghost will spend 25 days in Earth's orbit before embarking on a four-day journey to the moon, located around a quarter-million miles away.
The 6.6-foot-tall craft, carrying a slew of moon-investigation instruments like a lunar regolith vacuum and analyzer, will try landing in Mare Crisium, a lava-covered basin on the moon's near side. Previously, the robotic Soviet mission Luna 24 landed in Mare Crisium in 1976, capturing lunar soil and then rocketing it back to Earth.
NASA intends to land astronauts on the moon in mid-2027, but has also employed a number of companies to deliver lunar research technology to the moon via the space agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
But landing on the moon, a world with virtually no atmosphere to slow spacecraft down, remains daunting. Although Chinese and Indian craft have had recent landing successes, the U.S. commercial spacecraft Odysseus sustained damage while landing awkwardly in 2024. The same year, a Japanese craft landed upside down, on its head.
In the coming months, we'll see how Blue Ghost fares during its ambitious descent.
Topics NASA
