The moon is gigantic compared to a lunar lander. Imagine flying in orbit above the moon’s surface, looking down at all those craters and the gray landscape and then spotting something the size of a small car. That’s what NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander.
The spacecraft’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera snapped Blue Ghost at its landing site on the rim of a crater in a region called Mare Crisium. NASA describes the area as a “large, dark, basaltic plain on the moon that filled an ancient asteroid impact.”
Before And After Blue Ghost Lander Touchdown
The LRO team shared a before-and-after GIF showing how the lander’s arrival changed the immediate landscape.
Blue Ghost Mission 1 is also known as Ghost Riders in the Sky, an amusing reference to a country song about ghostly cattle and cowboys.
Lucky And Unlucky Moon Landers
It’s been an up-and-down time for lunar landers. Blue Ghost represents a triumph. It stuck the landing on March 2 and is now deep into its two-week mission timeline. The Intuitive Machines IM-2 Athena lander tried for a soft touchdown on March 6, but fell over on its side and wasn’t able to complete its science objectives.
LRO is likely on the lookout for the toppled-over Athena lander to add to its collection of lander images.
Both recent moon missions are connected to NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. CLPS is about NASA science catching rides to the moon with private companies. Blue Ghost’s NASA payloads include a lunar “vacuum cleaner” technology demonstration designed to suck up soil and rocks. These uncrewed robotic moon missions are precursors to NASA’s grand goal of returning astronauts to the moon’s surface through the Artemis program and establishing a long-term human presence there.
Orbiting The Moon
LRO launched in 2009 on a mission to map the moon’s surface. It’s taken up the lander-spotting hobby and has photographed many missions—both successful landings and crash sites. It captured the tipped-over Odysseus moon lander in early 2024. Odysseus was the precursor to Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Athena mission. The landers suffered similar fates.
Blue Ghost’s operations are timed to cover one lunar day, or about 14 Earth days. The lander has been busy working through its science tasks. It’s been operating NASA’s Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity payload. LISTER is a drill that takes the temperature of the moon’s interior. Firefly released a video of the drill digging into the surface, kicking up rocks and dust in an impressive fashion.
Blue Ghost captured a celebratory kickoff image of a lunar sunrise. Firefly Aerospace hopes to snap a bookend view of a lunar sunset at the end of operations.
LRO’s view from above is like spotting a needle in a haystack. It adds to the documentation of the Ghost Riders in the Sky mission and helps to put the lander’s position in perspective with the surrounding landscape. Exploring the moon is a grand adventure and every lander helps us build a better understanding of the moon, its available resources and how machines can arrive, survive and thrive on the surface.
