After lunar disappointments, NASA hits the jackpot with Blue Ghost Moon Lander

NASA bet a few years ago that commercial companies could bring scientific experiments to the moon with a lower budget than the agency.

Last year, that was a bad bet. The first spacecraft financed by NASA lost the moon completely. The second landed but fell.

But this month, a robotic landing called Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace from Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from beginning to end.

On March 16, the mood in Firefly's mission operations outside Austin was a mixture of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, there was nothing to do, except to see the company's spacecraft die.

At a quarter of a million miles away, the sun had already put itself in the maresto crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.

For the spacecraft with solar energy, the remaining hours were numbered and few.

“I think the mood is generally quite light,” said Ray Allensworth, director of the Space Saves program at Firefly, that afternoon. “I think people are excited and also relieved to see how well the mission was and take a time to enjoy the last hours with landing.”

Load scientists in the other commercial missions of Luna had invested years of effort and ended with little or nothing. Those NASA assigned to Blue Ghost are dating a cornucopia of new data to work.

Robert Grimm, scientist at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who directed one of the useful scientific charges, acknowledged his good fortune. “Better than being a crater,” he said.

One of NASA's experiments had collected data as well as Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from different angles of the exhaust of the spaces of the spacecraft while luning the lunar dust and carved a small crater.

“This gives us the capacity with these cameras to measure three -dimensional forms,” ​​said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists who work in the project known as stereo cameras for surface studies of lunar feathers or chasing leather.

Engineers want to understand these dynamics to avoid possible disasters when the largest and heavy spacecraft such as Spacex spaces astronauts on the moon. If NASA establishes an advanced mole, the spacecraft will return to that place more than once. The rocks that fly could knock out an engine in a descending spacecraft or damage the nearby structures.

In the first looks of the photographs, one of the surprises is that the exhaust column of the propellants began to kick lunar dust when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet on the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record the dust cloud of a much larger landing, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' Rocket Company, plans to send to the moon at the end of this year.

NASA not only wants to understand lunar dust or regolite, but also how to get rid of it. The particles can be sharp and abrasive as glass fragments, which represents a danger to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on the blue ghost called Electrodynamic dust shield used electric fields to clean the dust from the surfaces.

Two experiments gathered information that should shed light on the inside of the moon.

Dr. Grimm's payload was the Magnetothellúric Lunar probe, the first of its kind displayed on the surface of another world.

To deploy, spring pitchers threw four probes of the size of the soup cans in four different directions. Connected by landing cables, the probes functioned as large voltmeters. A second component, elevated on an eight -foot high mast, measured magnetic fields.

Together, these readings reveal natural variations in the electric and magnetic fields that say how easily electric currents flow deeply underground, and that says something about what is down there. The conductivity of the coldest rocks, for example, is lower.

Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill, using nitrogen gas bursts to dig dirt. A needle at the end of the instrument measured the temperature and how easily heat flows through the material. Due to the rocks along the way, the drill fell only about three feet, not the 10 feet that were expected.

In videos, “you can see the rocks flying and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, vice president of Systems of Exploration of Honeybee Robotics, which built the drill.

Even so, three feet were deep enough for scientific measurements, said Dr. Zacny. The exercise data and the Magnetotelian probe could give clues about how the moon formed and other rocky worlds or why the nearby side of the moon looks so different from the furthest side.

“It is really a basic question about lunar geology that we are trying to answer,” said Dr. Grimm.

Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, also built a second device called Planetvac to demonstrate simplified technology to collect samples. This device used compressed gas to cause regolito in a small tornado and direct it to a container.

The technology will be used in a Japanese robotic space mission known as the exploration of Martian moons, which will bring back samples of phobos, a Mars of Mars.

“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us confidence that it should also work in Phobos,” said Dr. Zacny.

Brian Walsh's experiment in Blue Ghost didn't look at the moon but back to earth.

“It is a really good point of view,” said Dr. Walsh, a mechanical engineering professor at Boston University.

Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that diverts the solar wind particles around the earth. His telescope recorded radiographs emitted when the high speed particles of the sun occur to atoms in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. The boundary between the magnetic field of the earth and the solar wind is like two Sumo fighters pushing each other. The opinion from afar should help scientists tell if that limit changes slowly or sudden jumps.

That is important because it affects how well the Earth's magnetic field protects us from occasional loaded particles that bomb the planet during the solar storms.

“We are trying to discover how that door opens and how energy spills,” said Dr. Walsh.

Blue Ghost has already left a lasting impression.

Maria Banks said that when she left the Mission Operations Center every night, she would look at the moon hanging in the sky.

“What basically would stop me dry every day,” said Dr. Banks. “I don't think I see the moon the same again, because for the rest of my life, Firefly's landing and our instruments will be up there.”