Blue Ghost landed almost dead center within its target zone
Click for before and after blink animation
The picture to the right, taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) prior to the successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, shows its entire landing region. The inset in the lower left is a picture taken by LRO on March 3, 2025, after landing.
The full picture was taken near sunset, with sunlight coming from the left. The inset was taken at sunrise, with sunlight coming from the right. This explains the difference in shadows between the two. Blue Ghost is the white dot in the inset with its long shadow, the black streak, cutting through the nearby crater. The first picture taken from the lander after landing looked down that shadow, looking across the crater.
The new picture tells us that Blue Ghost landed almost dead center in its target zone, indicating that the engineering worked as planned. The lander also used its computer brain to pick a good landing spot and avoid the nearby craters.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for before and after blink animation
The picture to the right, taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) prior to the successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, shows its entire landing region. The inset in the lower left is a picture taken by LRO on March 3, 2025, after landing.
The full picture was taken near sunset, with sunlight coming from the left. The inset was taken at sunrise, with sunlight coming from the right. This explains the difference in shadows between the two. Blue Ghost is the white dot in the inset with its long shadow, the black streak, cutting through the nearby crater. The first picture taken from the lander after landing looked down that shadow, looking across the crater.
The new picture tells us that Blue Ghost landed almost dead center in its target zone, indicating that the engineering worked as planned. The lander also used its computer brain to pick a good landing spot and avoid the nearby craters.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Seriously, Firefly hit a home run with this one.
Can’t wait to see their next mission in 2026.
I guess using the word “Blue” in the vehicle name didn’t jinx it, like I thought it might!
What was the design target spot? LRO ASU database on Quickmap says: “Tentative Firefly Blue Ghost 1 landing site” was 18.56 deg North, 61.81 deg East. This is supported by https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=BLUEGHOST
If so, then the recent LRO imaging data of 18.5623 deg N, 61.8103 deg East means the distance from the landing ellipse center and where it actually landed was 70m. The ellipse was 100m in radius. So, success!
Still, careful examination shows it landed on a small crater rim. The crater was 12 m diameter. This means it is roughly 1.2 m deep. So, its a good thing to have not landed in it since half the solar cells would have shadowed.
I am surprised that such a crater was within the ellipse. Expo facto.
“The lander also used its computer brain to pick a good landing spot and avoid the nearby craters.”
No doubt from the installed Neil Armstrong landing app; something IM may want to look into.
“No doubt from the installed Neil Armstrong landing app; something IM may want to look into.”
If we have the raw data from Apollos 11 through 17, perhaps soon we will be able to train a neural net to be exactly that!!
Apollo 11
“The Complete Descent”
(Apollo 11 Flight Journal 2019)
https://youtu.be/xc1SzgGhMKc
(19:52)
Very complete…
Firefly this evening tweeted out video of the LISTER drill drilling into the lunar surface. The media that Firefly has been posting from their mission is frankly as impressive as their achievement in landing in the first place. Seriously, this should be the gold standard for media show-and-tell for lunar missions now.
https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1899189419996766306
[NB: Mounted below Blue Ghost’s lower deck, NASA’s Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload is a pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics that measures the temperature and flow of heat from the Moon’s interior.]
More on Firefly’s live update site here: https://fireflyspace.com/news/blue-ghost-mission-1-live-updates/
It was not “dead center”.
It would be interesting to know why the lander “chose” to land so close to the crater rim versus farther away. As we saw with IM-2, you want to stay away from craters. They pose a risk from tip over or being too deep and thus blocking sunlight.