Private spacecraft gets dramatic view of Earth eclipsing moon

A robotic spacecraft has beamed home crisp videos and snapshots of Earth eclipsing the moon.

Though lunar eclipses generally aren’t that unusual — stargazers can watch Earth’s shadow obscuring the moon a few times a year — this was different.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander, a private spacecraft hired by NASA to take experiments to the moon, got a rare front-row seat of the spectacle in space. The phenomenon occurred when the blue marble came between the moon and the spacecraft.

Blue Ghost, named after an exotic species of firefly, captured the below footage while flying laps around Earth as it gears up for its first attempt at a lunar touchdown. Almost two weeks ago, the spacecraft witnessed another majestic moment when Earth eclipsed the sun. 

“Right now, we are in a period where we’re mostly just coasting for the next week-and-a-half or so, until we do our (Trans Lunar Injection) maneuver,” said Will Coogan, Blue Ghost’s chief engineer, in a video update, referring to the step that puts the lander on a moonbound trajectory. “During that period, we’re going to do a bunch of payload operations, continue with system checkouts, just make sure everything is precisely tuned before we do that.” 

Firefly’s lander, originally scheduled to lift off in late 2024, is the first NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission of the year. The program has invested $2.6 billion in contracts with vendors from the private sector to help deliver instruments to the moon and send back crucial data. 

The company is carrying 10 experiments for the space agency. NASA wants to see a regular cadence of moon missions to prepare for astronaut-led Artemis expeditions in 2027 or later.

Once Blue Ghost escapes Earth’s gravitational pull, it will take four days for it to arrive at the moon. The spacecraft will spend 16 days in lunar orbit before dropping to the surface, planned to happen on March 2. The descent is expected to last about one hour.

Watch this time-lapse video of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander capturing Earth eclipsing the moon.

Last week, after flying some 715,000 miles, the team completed test runs on a NASA experiment dubbed SCALPSS, short for Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies. It will observe the effects of engine plumes on lunar soil. 

As lunar trips become more frequent, the space agency wants to understand the impact those landings will have on other close vehicles and instruments. Firefly successfully received high-resolution images from all six of the SCALPSS cameras.

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“It’s been kind of a perpetual grind. We’ve been working very hard to try and make this dream a reality,” Coogan said. “The first images came down, and it forced everybody to pause and realize this thing we’ve been trying for, for all these years, is finally actually happening, and it’s working.” 

The mission seems to be going smoothly so far, but the team hasn’t encountered the hardest part yet. Landing on the moon is onerous. The moon’s exosphere provides virtually no drag to slow a spacecraft down as it approaches the ground. Furthermore, there are no GPS systems on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot.

So far just one company, Intuitive Machines, has made the journey all the way through lunar touchdown. Its craft landed sideways near the moon’s south pole in February 2024, still managing to operate from its awkward position.