A robotic spaceship from an American startup gently placed on a lavash plain on the early moon side of Sunday morning.
Lander Blue Ghost, built by the Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, was touched at 3:34 p.m.
“You have all stuck in the landing,” said Will Coogan, Ghost Blue’s leading engineer during a living room living room. “We are on the moon.”
A few minutes later, Jason Kim, the chief executive of Firefly, proudly stated, “We got some moon dust in our boots.”
Within about half an hour, the spaceship again sent its first picture of the moon surface.
It was a tremendous success for the company, achieving what many others have.
Among the countries, companies and organizations that have tried in the 21st century to settle mildly on the moon, only China can require full success in the first test. Others, including those from India, Russia, an Israeli nonprofit and a Japanese company, all collapsed and carved new craters on the lunar surface.
Last year, two landers – one sent by Jaxa, the Japanese space agency and the other from Houston’s intuitive car – successfully sat down and continued to work and communicate with the land. But the two collapsed, limiting what the spaceship could accomplish on the surface of the moon.
Intuitive machinery was the first private company to successfully land on the moon. Firefly is now second. Both are part of NASA’s efforts to use private enterprise to reduce the cost of obtaining scientific and technological loads on the moon. For this mission, NASA is paying firefly $ 101.5 million.
“What Firefly demonstrated today, I think they make it look easy, but it’s very difficult,” said Joel Kearns, Associate Deputy Administrator for Exploration at the NASA Scientific Mission Directorate during a press conference after landing.
Success provides a “test test” that NASA’s approach to financing such missions can work, said Dr. Kearns.
Since the beginning from the Kennedy Space Center of NASA in Florida on January 15, the Blue Ghost spaceship had performed almost perfectly.
“We haven’t had any big abnormalities, which is fantastic,” said Ray Allensworth, director of the Blue Ghost program in Firefly, during Livestream.
About an hour before landing, the spaceship executed a predetermined command to light its main engine for 19 seconds in order to noun itself from a 62 miles high orbit on a falling trail towards the surface.
At that moment, the spaceship was after the moon and out of communications. No one in the flight room did not know how the spaceship was making until it came out about 20 minutes later.
As it came out on the remote lunar side, all systems were functioning as expected, and Blue Ghost was where it was supposed to be.
About 11 minutes before landing, Lander, traveling at 3,800 miles per hour, fired his main engine to slow down again. For the last two minutes of ancestry, it was directed to a vertical orientation, avoided the risks, and settled at the rhythm of a slow walk.
“Oh my Lord, we did it!” Mrs. Allensworth shouted afterwards. “Amazing is amazing. My heart is beating so fast. ”
The landing site extends to Mare Crisium, a flat plane formed by the lava filled and harden within a wide crater of 345 miles carved by an ancient asteroid influence. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near Moon.
The mission is to last about 14 days Earth to the sunset.
Lander is holding 10 NASA instruments as part of the agency’s lunar commercial service program, or Clps. Some are focused on lunar dust, which is often angular, sticky and sharp – a strip for machinery and a possible health issue for future astronauts.
“We will see how dust adheres to various materials,” said Maria Banks, project scientist for NASA’s CLPS program during a press conference before starting. “We are getting stereo images as we descend to the surface to see how the lunar regimble is affecting the lunar regoline. And we will test the use of electromagnetism to soften or prevent the creation of dust.”
A receiver on the spaceship successfully traced the global navigation signals while in the lunar orbit. This suggests that signals from American GPS and European Galileo satellites used to navigate the ground can also help ship the ship find their way around the moon.
“By actually making it in the lunar orbit and the lunar surface, we are opening a whole new way for us to navigate the future,” said James Miller, a NASA official working on the instrument, said during the prior press conference.
An X -ray telescope will look back to the ground to capture a global view of the interactions between the magnetic field of the Earth and the charged particles of solar wind.
“We are getting the first global image of the magnetic field to understand how it moves as a function of time in response to the sun,” said Brian Walsh, an engineering professor at the University of Boston who is the main instrument investigator.
Lander is also holding a drill that is created to throw up to nine meters into the lunar land and measure the heat flow from the moon’s interior. Another experiment is a computer created to recover from errors caused by radiation of space.
Landing put a very successful success center in a company that has sometimes been more involved in the courtroom and political drama than the beginning of Rockets and Landers Moon.
The original version of the company, Firefly Space Systems, was founded in 2014. The executive chief was Thomas Markusic, a airspace engineer who had previously worked for three billionaire -owned missiles: Elon Musk’s Spacex, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic Richard Branson.
Virgin Galactic filed a lawsuit against Firefly, claiming that Mr. Markusic had stolen her trading secrets in the founding of Firefly. In 2016, a major European investor was supported, and Firefly placed all his employees in the oven while his money was dried.
A technology entrepreneur, Max Polyakov, came to the rescue, and the firefly space systems were reborn as Firefly Aerospace. But in 2022, the United States Government, citing national security concerns, forced Dr. Polyakov, a native to Ukraine, sell its part of firefly.
But Firefly had also won several key contracts, including the mission set on the Moon on Sunday.
In previous years, Firefly has successfully launched some of its small rocket Alpha several times, including a mission for the United States spatial strength that demonstrated the ability to prepare and initiate a short notice. Firefly is also developing a larger rocket currently known as the Middle Start vehicle, and a series of cosmic boats known as elytra that can perform various tasks in orbit.
Firefly has also won two more CLPS missions.
The second, planned to start next year, is to land on the remote side of the moon. Third, planned for 2028, is to investigate Grithuisen, an unusual volcanic region on the nearby moon.
“As long as we execute, we will continue to continue bolder and bigger,” said Jason Kim, the chief executive of Firefly, in an interview last week.
The moon will continue to be a busy place. Another mission clps is just a few days away. The second moon lander of intuitive machinery, Athena, is scheduled to land on Thursday near the south pole of the moon.
And yet another spaceship is also on the road. In the same spacex rocket Falcon 9 that started Blue Ghost to Orbit was resistance, a lunar land built by Japan’s Ispace.
Although the resistance left the ground at the same time as Ghost Blue, it is taking a longer, more efficient fuel route to the moon and is expected to enter orbit around the moon in early May.