A private moonlander who performed a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA with the Mond Sunday, a success with the latest company in a number of companies that want to start business on earth before the missions on earth before the earth on earth.
The Blue Ghost Lander from Firefly Aerospace relegated from the lunar orbit on Autopilot and aimed at the slopes of an old volcanic worker in an impact basin on the northeastern edge of the proximity.
The successful touchdown of the company came from the company’s mission control outside of Austin, Texas, after the campaign in about 360,000 kilometers.
“They all put the landing. We are on the moon,” said the Will Coogan from Firefly Coogan.
A upright and stable landing makes Firefly – a startup founded a decade ago – the first private outfit to put a spaceship on the moon without falling or falling over. Even the countries have stalled, with only five success: Russia, the USA, China, India and Japan.
Halpe Ghost began to send pictures of the surface half an hour after landing. The second shot included the home planet, a blue point that shimmered in the blackness of the room.
Two other corporate countries are hot for Blue Ghosts Heels, and the next one is expected to take part in the moon later this week.
The Blue Ghost – named after a rare US glowworm species – had its size and shape. The four -legged crouch is two meters high and 3.5 meters wide and, according to the company, offers additional stability.
The Firefly Aerospace, based in the USA, plans to carry out several mond experiments for NASA, while the ISPACE based in Tokyo has a separate mission.
In mid -January from Florida, the Lander started 10 experiments for the moon for NASA. The space agency paid 101 million US dollars in the United States (146 million US dollars CDN) for the delivery and 44 million US dollars (64 million US dollars CDN) for science and technology on board. It is the third mission under the commercial Lunar Delivery program of NASA that ignites a fond of competing private companies as they are lying around before Astronauts appear later this decade.
Exact position unknown
Ray Allensworth from Firefly said that the lander skipped dangers including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said that the team continued to analyze the data to find out the exact position of the landing, but all indications indicate that it ended up in mare-maticmatics within the 100-meter zone.
The demos should get two weeks before the lunar day ends and the lander ends.
It wore a vacuum to suck moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure the temperature up to three meters below the surface. Also on board: a device for the elimination of abrasive moon dust-one flagella for the lengthy Apollo Moonwalker of NASA, which have stuck it all over their spatial suits and equipment.
On the way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back after exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander once stood out in circulation of the moon with detailed shots of the gray pockn surface of the moon. At the same time, an on-board receiver pursued and acquired signals from the US GPS and the European Galileo constellations, which has an encouraging step in navigation for future explorers.
The landing provided the stage for a fresh visit that dealt with a piece of moon business.
Another landing and thin four-meter-sized and operated and operated and intuitive machines in Houston on the moon on Thursday. It aims at the bottom of the moon, just 160 kilometers from the South Pole. This is closer to the pole when the company had last year with its first lander, who broke and tipped over a leg.
Despite the fall, the country of intuitive machines put the United States back on the moon for the first time since the Apollo program was completed in 1972.
A third country of the Japanese company ISPACE is still three months of landing. On January 15, it shared a rocket trip with Blue Ghost by Cape Canaveral and took a longer, windy route. Like intuitive machines, ISPACE is trying to land on the moon for the second time. His first lander crashed in 2023.
The moon is not only littered with Ispace, but also dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.
NASA wants to maintain a pace of two private moonlanders a year and find that some missions will fail, Nicky Fox told the space agency of the space agency.
“It really opens up a whole new way of bringing more science into space and the moon,” said Fox.
In contrast to NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings, the billions of dollars, and ACE astronauts at the top, private companies work with a limited budget with robot vehicle that has to land on its own, said Jason Kim, CEO from Firefly.
Kim said everything was like clockwork.
“We have some moon dust on our boots,” said Kim.
