Blue Ghost will deploy the NASA-funded LuSEE-Night instrument once on the lunar surface.
Blue Ghost demonstrated a precision landing and obtained the first GPS/GNSS lock on the Moon.
Honeybee Robotics operated instruments on Blue Ghost Mission 1.
Firefly Aerospace achieved the first true soft lunar landing for the United States in the 21st century with Blue Ghost.
Firefly Aerospace concluded the mission portion of Blue Ghost under NASA’s CLPS program as intended.
NASA will study Blue Ghost sunset imagery from multiple cameras and surface dust photos from the SCALPSS instrument to investigate whether electrically charged levitating dust causes the lunar horizon glow.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander captured a lunar sunset and associated horizon glow on March 16.
NASA intends to make SCALPSS payload data from Blue Ghost public within six months.
Blue Ghost captured a total solar eclipse from the Moon on March 14, 2024, recording sunlight refracting through Earth’s outer atmosphere as a ring glow.
Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander, part of NASA’s CLPS program, conducted nominal payload operations until just after the end of lunar day on March 16, 2024.
Blue Ghost’s thruster plumes kicked up lunar dust, soil, and rocks (regolith) during descent, and the SCALPSS image suite will be used to study plume-regolith interactions.
The retroreflector atop Blue Ghost successfully reflected laser pulses from Earth-based ranging observatories.
Since March 3, 2024, Blue Ghost intermittently operated the LISTER drill, which was developed by Honeybee Robotics and Texas Tech University and flight-funded by NASA.
The RAC instrument onboard Blue Ghost observed that lunar regolith adheres differently to different materials on the Moon.
Blue Ghost operated into a portion of lunar night for about five hours at the end of the local day on March 16, 2024, as planned.
Blue Ghost made eclipse observations across five hours on battery power while surrounding surface temperatures dropped far below 0°C and reached approximately -170°C.
NASA released initial pictures from the multi-camera SCALPSS payload onboard Blue Ghost taken during the lander’s last 28 meters of lunar descent.
The LEXI instrument onboard Blue Ghost captured X-ray images to study interactions between the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field.
The LISTER drill on Blue Ghost reached about one meter into the lunar surface, short of its intended drilling depth of up to three meters.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged Blue Ghost on March 3 at coordinates 18.5623°N, 61.8103°E.