NASA has released the first high-definition photos of a sunset on the moon, which are showing stunning pictures taken by the private lander Blue Ghost. The two photos were presented at a press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday. The photos are part of the 14-day mission in collaboration with Texas-based Firefly Aerospace.
Blue Ghost, which landed on March 2 near the Mons Latreille volcanic feature in Mare Crisium on the moon’s northeastern rim, is one of NASA’s $2.6 billion investments to pay for the Artemis program and lower the cost of space exploration. The mission is also designed to assist commercial payload operators in increasing their involvement in lunar exploration.
The images capture the gradual development of glow along the moon’s horizon as it is setting, captured in the west with Earth and Venus as a backdrop. The light, commonly known as the lunar horizon glow, has been a source of interest to scientists for a long time. Originally described by astronaut Eugene Cernan during the 1972 Apollo 17 flight, lunar horizon glow is caused by tiny particles in the thin atmosphere of the Moon which are excited by sunrise and sunset, and with speculation surrounding why these particles are said to float.
NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Joel Kearns, for exploration, said about the scientific and visual value of the photos: “The images themselves are quite aesthetic, quite pretty, but now it is the time when people in the field need to go through them and compare them to other mission data.” The images can reveal the secret of the lunar horizon glow, which puzzled moon scientists for a long time.
The Blue Ghost lander, about the same size as a hippopotamus, also captured high-definition images of a complete eclipse on March 14, when the Earth briefly inserted itself between the sun and the moon’s edge. Blue Ghost was launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket on Jan. 15 and carried many science experiments along, including a lunar soil analyzer and radiation-resistant computer.
Firefly Aerospace CEO Jason Kim also marked the success of the mission, calling it a historic event in commercial moon landing. Kim believes that this mission will be one of the cornerstone pillars in human ongoing lunar exploration.
Only a few weeks earlier, another private mission, Intuitive Machines’ Athena probe, also did not successfully land on the moon.
