US space firm Firefly Aerospace has released videos of some of the payloads released by its Blue Ghost lander, days after the spacecraft’s successful March 2 landing on the lunar surface.
Blue Ghost touched down near Mons Latreille, a solitary lunar peak in the vast basin Mare Crisium (or “Sea of Crises”) in the northeastern region of the moon’s near side.
Among the videos released by Firefly, which is based in Texas, one is of LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity) experiment, a Blue Ghost payload which has been drilling into the lunar surface over the past week, space.com reported.
The video shows LISTER, a pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics, boring into the moon, resulting in small explosive eruptions that throw off sparks, possibly due to the electrically-charged lunar surface.
Using purified nitrogen, LISTER aims to reach 2-3 metres deep, measuring temperatures to analyse the moon’s internal heat flow patterns.
Meanwhile, the Blue Ghost lander also deployed four tethered electrodes and an 8-foot mast that make up NASA’s Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) payload, to study the structure and composition of the moon’s mantle.
Another payload, Lunar PlanetVac, successfully collected, transferred, and sorted lunar soil from the moon using pressurized nitrogen gas.
10
The US space agency, as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, has 10 payloads on Blue Ghost, eight of which had already met their mission objectives as of March 6, according to Firefly. One of these payloads is SCALPSS, which observed the effects of Blue Ghost’s engine plumes on lunar regolith when the lander touched down on the moon.
Though Blue Ghost’s progress has been good, the mission will end on March 16, after which the solar-powered lander will run out of energy and come to the end of its mission.
However, before shutting down, the lander plans to capture images of the sunset to study the behaviour of levitating lunar dust at day’s end.
