We knew it was only going to operate for one lunar day, but it was still a little surprising to say goodnight and goodbye to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Sunday evening after lunar sunset at its landing site on the Mare Crisium Sunday the 16th. New Moon, after all, is March 29th so parts of the moon still have nearly two Earth weeks of sunlight left. It's just that the Sea of Crises is closer to the eastern limb, so sunrise and set both happen earlier on the calendar there than farther west on the moon.
Blue Ghost landed on the moon at 3:34 EST on Sunday March 2nd, so shutting down on the 16th meant 14 days of operation on the moon which was the targeted life of the mission they called Ghost Riders in the
Sky.
"We battle-tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point," Blue Ghost Chief Engineer Will Coogan said in a Firefly statement today (March 17) that announced the end of the mission.
"But what really sets this team apart is the passion and commitment to each other," he added. "Our team may look younger and less experienced than those of many nations and companies that attempted moon landings before us, but the support we have for one another is what fuels the hard work and dedication to finding every solution that made this mission a success."
Blue Ghost was part of NASA's CLPS program - Commercial Lunar Payload Services - and was carrying 10 different payloads for the agency.
The lander beamed home a total of 119 gigabytes (GB) of data, including 51 GB of science information, before going dark as expected on Sunday at around 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT), according to Firefly.
...
"We're incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled, from tracking GPS signals on the moon for the first time to robotically drilling deeper into the lunar surface than ever before," [Firefly CEO Jason] Kim said. "We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond."
Firefly documented all 10 of the science payloads on their own website in their "Farewell Blue Ghost" post. And a YouTube channel called iGadgetPro that I think I watched for the first time ever had a video about the mission closing down that included this text that was left on screen for 30 seconds. That's a long time for a video that's three minutes long.
Screen capture from the iGadgetPro video.
From what I understand, missions to cold places need an atomic pile to keep the components functional.
ReplyDeleteDoes this mean that Moon probes will always die at sunset?
I've done cursory searches for builders of nuclear power plants in the U.S. to research investment opportunities, but I didn't find useful data. I wouldn't know what search terms to use for 'nuclear generators in space'.