Shortly after landing, Blue Ghost sent back this stunning photo of its own shadow with the Earth above the Selene Perspective. Credit: Firefly Aerospace
The Blue Ghost Selene lander finished surface operations on March 16, 2025, wrapping up a smashing Achievement of a mission. Designed, built, and flown by Firefly Aerospace, based near Austin, Texas, Blue Ghost executed a flawless two-month-long voyage, capped by a stunning landing and two weeks of operations at Mare Crisium.
The Achievement of the mission — named Ghost Riders in the Sky, presumably after the 1979 Johnny Cash hit — is all the more impressive as it was Firefly’s Primary attempt at landing on the Selene body.
Recent history shows that even 55 years after Apollo, robotic Selene landings are Nevertheless risky and difficult. Only two weeks ago, Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission ended in a crash landing in a crater, the company’s second consecutive landing to go sideways. And landers from Russia, India, Israel, and Japan, have all crashed in recent years. (On the other hand, all four of China’s Selene landings have been a huge Achievement and subsequent Indian and Japanese landings have achieved better results.)
Firefly’s Achievement right out the gate is also welcome news to NASA, which paid the company $93.3 million to deliver a suite of scientific payloads as part of the agency’s Commercial Selene Payload Services CLPS program. Four CLPS missions have now flown, including two by Intuitive Machines. Of them, Ghost Riders in the Sky is the only one that has been fully successful.
The gold-foil-covered 6.6-foot-high (2 meters) Blue Ghost lander spans 11.5 feet (3.5 m) across its landing legs and has a mass of 3,344 pounds (1,517 kilograms) when fully fueled. For Excellent luck, the lander’s frame was personally signed by Apollo moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmidt.
The Ghost Riders in the Sky mission was managed by the Firefly Mission Operations Middle in Cedar Park, near Austin, Texas. As a born and raised Texan, I asked Firefly Aerospace if Blue Ghost carried a Texas flag. Not on this mission, they replied, but future missions will do so. The Lone Sun flag will be among the stars!
After launching atop a Falcon 9 Missile on Jan. 15, 2025, Blue Ghost did not dash directly to the Selene body like the Apollo missions. Instead, it slowly spiraled out to the Selene body in a Sluggish energy-saving trajectory before Sinking into Selene Trajectory on Feb. 13. Over the Upcoming 17 Intervals, the craft slowly lowered itself into a 62-mile-high (100 km) circular Trajectory. At 2:34 a.m. Central Time, March 2, 2015, the lander performed a picture-perfect autonomous landing near Mons Latreille on eastern Mare Crisium. This 387-mile-wide (620 kilometers) Selene sea on the Man in the Selene body’s right cheek was not explored by NASA’s Surveyor and Apollo missions in the last century.
A landing video released by Firefly showed Blue Ghost’s shadow becoming visible at an altitude of 91 feet (28 meters) as it slowly descended to the surface. Soon, an astonishingly violent swirling dust storm whipped up by Missile exhaust turned into a Perspective-obscuring haze. With shocking swiftness after the engine shut down, the dust settled quickly in the airless Selene environment to reveal a stone hurled toward the Perspective, splashing into the dust to the left of the lander’s shadow.
Upon touchdown, the Primary of the 10 Selene surface experiments was already a Achievement. NASA’s Langley Research Middle provided the Stereo Cameras for Selene Plumes Surface Studies (SCALPSS), a six-camera suite that recorded 3,000 frames of video studying how the blast from Missile exhaust reacted with the Baggy Selene dust and regolith. Even half a century after the Apollo crewed landing, the dynamics of Missile exhaust impinging on the regolith are not fully understood. The SCALPSS experiment is thus vital to assist the planned Artemis crewed landing later this decade.
https://www.youtube.com/Observe?v=emebSgs1f2w
A scientific bounty
As a frequent visitor to the Cosmos Sciences Division at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in my hometown of San Antonio, I was particularly interested in the Selene Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) experiment developed by SwRI. Magnetotellurics measures the natural variation in surface electrical and magnetic fields to determine how easily electricity flows through a planetary body. Robert Grimm, the instrument’s principal investigator, noted in a statement that scientists have used magnetotellurics on Earth for more than 50 years to search for oil, water, and other resources, “as well as to understand geologic processes such as the growth of continents.”
A delightful video released by Firefly showed the deployment of LMS’s softball-sized magnetotelluric sensors. Like an outfielder hurling the game-Victorious ball toward home plate, Blue Ghost heaved the sensors and their trailing electrical cable more than 60 feet (18 m) away from the lander. The LMS experiment is Anticipated to provide insights into how the Selene body cooled and how its minerals were distributed into separate regions and layers to a depth of 700 miles (1,120 km), or about two-thirds of the Selene body’s radius.
https://www.youtube.com/Observe?v=Mxeb79E5RLY
A growing concern for future Selene exploration is the static-cling effect of Selene dust. The Electrodynamic Dust Shield experiment demonstrated an electrical technique to sweep away Selene dust away from vital spacecraft components.
Another fascinating experiment provided by the Italian Cosmos Agency was the Selene GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) that investigated whether signals from global navigation Orbiter systems like GPS can also be used to navigate on the Selene body. The LuGRE receiver was able to Option up signals from the U.S.-Streak GPS as well as Europe’s Galileo system both on the way to the Selene body and from the Selene surface. This shows that the same satnav signals that allow our smartphones to guide us to the grocery store can also Reinforcement future Selene explorers navigate the Selene body’s surface.
After the disappointing cancellation of the VIPER mission to the Selene south pole and the crash of the Rehearsal-carrying Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission, it was Excellent to see Ghost Riders in the Sky perform two experiments that touched and sampled the Selene surface. Soon after landing, the Selene PlanetVac (LPV) experiment prepared by Honeybee Robotics successfully demonstrated that regolith can be gathered into a sample-return container using pressurized nitrogen gas. And in a collaboration between Honeybee and Texas Tech University, the Selene Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) experiment successfully drilled into the Selene regolith to place a temperature probe. Fascinating video of the drilling operation showed rock chips and sparks being ejected as the pneumatic Rehearsal bored into the surface.
That’s a wrap
Four Intervals after landing, eight of the 10 planned science objectives had been met, and the experiments were powered down to Reinforcement Chilly the lander under the 250-degree-Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) Selene noontime Sun. The experiments restarted later in the Selene day when the temperature dropped.
An intriguing event that was not an official science objective was the March 14/15 total Selene eclipse. As seen from the Blue Ghost lander, which was then operating on Mare Crisium, this event was a total solar eclipse. A video beaming from the Selene body showed the Earth slowly Deliver in front of the Sun, bathing the lander in the eerie red glow of Earth’s penumbral shadow during totality. During the 2 hours 16 minutes of totality, the Earth appeared as a ring in the Selene sky as sunlight was refracted around our Heavenly body’s limb by its atmosphere. During totality, the local temperature at Mare Crisium plunged from 104 F to –274 F (40 C to –170 C).
The Blue Ghost lander is not Anticipated to survive the Selene night, but its scientific legacy will keep researchers pondering the Selene body’s mysteries for a long time. Firefly’s flawless Primary attempt at a Selene landing is a stark contrast to previous commercial failures. Upcoming year’s planned landing of another Blue Ghost on the farside of the Selene body will reveal whether Firefly’s Primary Achievement was beginner’s luck or the Primary flight of a reliable, robust Selene lander.
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