Landing in the lowlands
“Blue Ghost” to touch down on the moon today
For the first time, a commercial lander has successfully landed on the moon. Around six weeks after its launch, the "Blue Ghost" probe touched down on Earth's satellite at around 9.35 a.m. CET on Sunday.
The "Blue Ghost", which is around two meters high and three meters wide, was launched in January from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida using a Falcon 9 rocket from tech billionaire Elon Musk's space company SpaceX. The lunar module "Resilience" from the Japanese start-up ispace was also launched. However, it is scheduled to fly to the moon on a different orbit and will not arrive there for several months.
Landing in the Mare Crisium lowlands
"Blue Ghost" landed in the so-called Mare Crisium, a lowland plain with a diameter of around 500 kilometers. The lunar lander has materials and instruments on board for ten scientific investigations by NASA, which will be used to study the Earth's satellite for around two weeks.
Among other things, it is planned to drill into the surface to take samples. The information will be used to prepare the planned manned missions to the moon. The US space agency is currently planning the first manned moon landing in more than 50 years for 2027.
After around two weeks, i.e. a whole day on the moon, the sun will set at the landing site. "Blue Ghost" will take photos of this spectacle and provide data on how the loose rock on the moon reacts to the influence of the sun at dusk.
The mission, called "Ghost Riders in the Sky", is the first lunar mission by Firefly Aerospace, a company based in Texas (USA) that has so far mainly developed launch vehicles.
NASA wants to gather knowledge cheaply
"Blue Ghost" is part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program. With this program, the US space agency wants to gather as much knowledge as possible on its own way back to the moon comparatively cheaply and efficiently by awarding contracts for moon landings to private companies and working together with them. A total of around 2.6 billion dollars (around 2.4 billion euros) has been budgeted for the CLPS program until 2028.
Lunar landings technically highly challenging
In February 2024, the company Intuitive Machines succeeded in making the first commercial landing on the moon with the "Nova-C" lander. However, the lander tipped over during touchdown. However, data was still collected. Moon landings are considered to be technically highly demanding and often go wrong.
It was only on Wednesday that the company Intuitive Machines sent off a second lunar lander. "Athena" is scheduled to touch down on Earth's satellite on Thursday at the earliest.
This article has been automatically translated,
read the original article here.
Kommentare
Liebe Leserin, lieber Leser,
die Kommentarfunktion steht Ihnen ab 6 Uhr wieder wie gewohnt zur Verfügung.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
das krone.at-Team
User-Beiträge geben nicht notwendigerweise die Meinung des Betreibers/der Redaktion bzw. von Krone Multimedia (KMM) wieder. In diesem Sinne distanziert sich die Redaktion/der Betreiber von den Inhalten in diesem Diskussionsforum. KMM behält sich insbesondere vor, gegen geltendes Recht verstoßende, den guten Sitten oder der Netiquette widersprechende bzw. dem Ansehen von KMM zuwiderlaufende Beiträge zu löschen, diesbezüglichen Schadenersatz gegenüber dem betreffenden User geltend zu machen, die Nutzer-Daten zu Zwecken der Rechtsverfolgung zu verwenden und strafrechtlich relevante Beiträge zur Anzeige zu bringen (siehe auch AGB). Hier können Sie das Community-Team via unserer Melde- und Abhilfestelle kontaktieren.