An American company successfully landed its spacecraft on the moon on Sunday after a long journey through space, which marks only the second private mission to achieve milestones – and the first to do so.
The blue ghost mission of the firefly aerospace touched down after 3:34, which was a short time after Mons Latreil, the US Eastern time (0834 GMT), a volcano in the mare chriceum on the north -east of the moon.
“You are in landing, we are on the moon,”, an engineer at Austin, Texas, “, an engineer in Mission Control in Texas said that the team exploded in Cheers.
We are baaack! ,
Blue Ghost landed, safely providing 10 NASA scientific investigation and technical demos that will help us learn more about the lunar environment and support future astronauts on the moon and Mars. pic.twitter.com/GUGFDSXY3
– NASA (@nasa) March 2, 2025
A first image is expected soon. CEO Jason Kim later confirmed that the spacecraft was “stable and honest” – unlike the first private landing in last February, which came down sideways.
“We are on the moon!” Nikki Fox, Associate Administrator of the Directorate of Sciences of NASA, Anandit.
The surname “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, Mission is part of the NASA-industry partnership that aims to reduce the cost and support Artemis, designed to return astronauts on the moon.
Golden Lander, about the size of a hippopotamus, was launched on 15 January on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which captures the stunning footage of the Earth and Moon on the way. It shared a ride with a Japanese company lander to try landing in May.
Blue Ghosts have 10 tools, including a lunar soil analyst, a radiation-tolerant computer and testing the viability of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the moon.
Designed to work for a full lunar day (14 Earth days), the Blue Ghost is expected to capture the imagination of the total eclipse on 14 March, when the Earth blocks the Sun from the horizon of the moon.
On 16 March, it will record a lunar sunset, in which insight will be offered how the dust moves above the surface under solar effects – Apollo Astronaut Uurannan form the first dysented lunar horizon gloss.
The arrival of the Blue Ghost will be followed by the IM-2 mission of fellow Texas Company Internet Machines on 6 March, which will feature its lander Athana.
In February 2024, spontaneous machines became the first private company to receive a soft lunar landing – the first American landing since the 1972 crude Apollo 17 mission.
However, the success got angry with an accident: the lander came down very fast and stuck on the effect, unable to generate sufficient solar energy and shorten the mission.
This time, the company says that it has made significant improvements in a hexagonal -shaped lander, with a long, slimmer profile compared to the blue ghost, and is around the height of an adult giraffe.
Ethena on Wednesday rode on a SpaceX rocket and adopted another straight route towards Mons Mutton – the southern lunar landing site once tried.
Its payload includes three rovers, a drill of a drill to search for snow and the show: a first-round hoping drone designed to detect the rugged area of the moon.
NASA’s private moon fleet
Descending on the moon presents unique challenges due to the absence of an environment, making parachutes ineffective.
Instead, the spacecraft must rely on an accurately controlled thruster burn to slow down its offspring.
Until the first successful mission of intuitive machines, only five national space agencies fulfilled this feat: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan, in that order.
Now, the United States is working to regularize the private lunar mission through NASA’s $ 2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Palor Services (CLPS) program.
Missions come in a delicate moment to NASA, amidst speculation that it can refund or cancel his Artemis Chandra program in favor of prioritizing Mars exploration – a major target of both President Donald Trump and his close advisor, SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
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