Blue Ghost is in Lunar Orbit

On Monday we reported Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander had done its translunar orbit injection and was on the way to lunar orbit.  As planned, the lander had the engine burn to insert into lunar orbit yesterday and is now refining its orbit with landing scheduled for March 2nd.  

Firefly posted Thursday: 

The Firefly team nailed our most challenging burn to date! Starting at 7:51 p.m. CST on February 13, the team completed a 4 minute, 15 second Lunar Orbit Insertion burn with Blue Ghost’s RCS thrusters and main engine to enter an elliptical orbit around the Moon. Over the next 16 days, we’ll conduct additional maneuvers to circularize our orbit and get closer to the lunar surface.

The probe's onboard cameras captured several snapshots edited into this short video;

Firefly Aerospace posted to X (as if it was supposed to be from Blue Ghost):

Blue Ghost, as you know, launched on a Falcon 9 that also carried the Resilience lander from ispace, which will take another couple of months before landing.  ispace has been gearing up for a lunar flyby that will take place around Feb. 15, although landing looks to be around May.  That's not all of the moon landings for this year, though. 

Intuitive Machines, whose IM-1 was a successful mission although the landing was nothing like what was planned, is coming up soon, too.  I think I coined the term "first commercial crash landing" for IM-1 because the lander (officially Odysseus and quickly renamed Odie) broke a leg on the approach to its landing spot and tipped over upon landing.  Intuitive Machines will launch their IM-2 lander, called Athena, on February 26.  Athena will also ride a Falcon 9.  IM believes they've taken care of the cause of Odie's crash landing.