Firefly’s Dazzling Images of Earth Eclipsing the Sun

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission-1 captured a dazzling image of the Sun emerging from behind Earth early this morning from its vantage point on the Moon. BGM-1 is nearing the end of its 14-day operational life, the first fully successful commercial lunar lander.

BGM-1 landed in Mare Crisium early on March 2 and has been operating its 10 NASA instruments ever since. One of its cameras took images of last night’s total solar eclipse as seen from the Moon where the Earth blocked the Sun. At 4:30 am EDT this morning, it captured the “diamond ring” effect as the Sun began to emerge from behind the Earth.

Another image taken three hours earlier is similarly spectacular.

Like other small, relatively inexpensive landers being sent to the Moon these days by companies and countries, BGM-1 is not designed to survive the bitter cold 14-day lunar night.  Operations are expected to end on March 16 several hours after sunset when the lander’s solar arrays no longer can provide power and warmth for the batteries and electronics. More complex and resilient landers, like China’s today and U.S. and Soviet landers in the 1960s and 1970s, use radioisotope power sources.

BGM-1’s landing spot is 18.56ºN, 61.81ºE.

All of the Moon experiences 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of darkness except for permanently shadowed regions at the north and south poles.  There is no “dark” side, only the near-side that always faces Earth and the far-side that always faces away because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth.

BGM-1 is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. NASA began the CLPS program in 2018 to encourage commercial companies to participate in lunar exploration through Public-Private Partnerships.  NASA buys services to deliver NASA science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. The companies design, build and launch the landers and are expected to find non-NASA customers to close the business case. Nine companies, including Firefly, were chosen in the first round of contracts and five more were selected later.

For BGM-1, NASA paid Firefly $101 million for delivery services and spent another $44 million on its 10 payloads:

• Next Generation Lunar Retroreflector (NGLR)
• Radiation Tolerant Computer System (RadPC)
• Regolith Adherence Characterization (RAC)
• Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS)
• Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-Ray Imager (LEXI)
• Lunar PlanetVac (LPV)
• Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER)
• Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) 1.1
• Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS)
• Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE)

BGM-1 is the third of four CLPS missions launched so far. The first, Astrobotic’s Peregrine in January 2023, did not reach the Moon because of a propulsion failure. The second and fourth, Intuitive Machines-1 (IM-1) in February 2023 and IM-2 last week, were able to land, but both tipped over and only very limited operations were possible. NASA considers all of them successes because they provide lessons learned for future missions, paving the way for a commercial lunar economy.

NASA has more CLPS missions planned, including two more that might launch this year although the agency stresses it is the companies, not NASA, that decide when to launch.