NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could bring scientific experiments to the moon with a lower budget than the agency.
Last year, it was a bad bet. The first spatial vehicle financed by NASA completely missed the moon. The second has landed but has fallen.
But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, in Texas, managed from start to finish.
On March 16, the mood to the Firefly mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholy. There was nothing else to worry about, nothing to do, except looking at the company’s spatial vehicle to die.
At a quarter of a million miles away, the sun had already placed itself on the mare crisis, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.
For the sun -energy space vehicle, the remaining hours were numbered and few.
“I think the mood is generally quite light,” said Ray Allensworth, director of the Firefly space program that afternoon. “I think people are just enthusiastic and also somehow raised to see how well the mission went and take a moment to enjoy the last hours with the Lander.”
Scientists with loads in the other commercial moon missions had invested years of efforts and ended with little or nothing. Those NASA assigned to Blue Ghost are leaving with a cornucopia of new data to work with.
Robert Grimm, scientist of the Southwest Research Institute of Boulder, in Colorado, who led one of the scientific payloads, recognized his fortune. “Better to be a crater,” he said.
One of the experiments of NASA had collected data just as Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from several corners of the drain of the spacecraft engine as they raised the lunar powder and sculpted a small crater.
“This gives us the ability with these cameras to measure three -dimensional shapes,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists who work on the project known as stereo cameras for surface studios of the lunar plume or Pelleps leather.
Engineers want to understand those dynamics to prevent potential catastrophes when larger and heavier space vehicles such as Spacex’s land astroners on the moon. If NASA creates a lunar outpost, Spacecraft will return to that site more than once. The rocks that flew upwards could eliminate an engine on a descending spatial vehicle or damage the nearby structures.
At the beginning of the photographs, one of the surprises is that the engine drain plume started kicking the lunar powder when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same system of cameras is to record the cloud of dust from a much larger Lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, the missile company of Jeff Bezos, plans to send to the moon by the end of the year.
NASA does not just want to understand lunar powder, or regolite, but also like getting rid of it. The particles can be sharpened and abrasive as glass fragments, placing a danger to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on Blue Ghost called the electrodynamic powder shield used electric fields to clean the surfaces of the powder.
Two experiments have collected information that should throw light inside the moon.
The Payload of Dr. Grimm was the lunar magnetotelluric sound, the first of its kind deployed on the surface of another world.
To distribute, the spring loaded launchers launched four probes of the size of the soup cans in four different directions. Connected by the cables to the Lander, the probes worked as replaced voltmeters. A second component, raised at the top of an eight -foot tall tree, measured magnetic fields.
Together, these readings reveal natural variations in electrical and magnetic fields that tell how easily electric currents flow in depth underground and that tells something about what is over there. The conductivity of the coldest rocks, for example, is lower.
Blue Ghost also lined up a pneumatic drill, using nitrogen gas explosions to dig dirt. At the end of the instrument, a needle measured the temperature and the ease of heat flows through the material. Due to the rocks in the middle, the drill went down only about three feet, not the 10 feet hoped for.
In the videos, “you can see the rocks that fly and sparkle,” said Kris Zacn, vice -president of the Honeybee Robotics exploration systems, who built the drill.
However, three feet was quite deep for scientific measurements, said dr. Zacn. The data of the drill and the magnetotelluric sound could both give suggestions on how the moon and other rocky worlds formed or because the nearby side of the moon seems so different from the opposite side.
“It is truly a fundamental question about the lunar geology that we are trying to answer,” said dr. Grimm.
Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, has also built a second device called Planetvac to demonstrate simplified technology to collect samples. This device used compressed gas to mix the regolite in a small tornado and direct it in a container.
The technology will be used in a Japanese robotic spatial mission known as Martian Moons Exploration, which will report champions of Phobos, a Moon by Mars.
“The fact that he worked on the moon gives us the trust that should also work on Phobos,” said Dr. Zacn.
Brian Walsh’s experiment on Blue Ghost did not look at the moon but again on Earth.
“It’s an excellent point of view,” said dr. Walsh, a mechanical engineering professor at Boston University.
Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that deflects the sunny wind particles around the earth. His telescope recorded the X -rays emitted when high -speed particles from the sun slammed into atoms in the upper atmosphere of the earth. The border between the Earth’s magnetic field and the sun wind is like two Suman wrestlers who push each other. The opinion from afar should help scientists to say if that border moves slowly or in sudden jumps.
This is important because it affects the way in which the magnetic field of the Earth protects us from the occasional embers of charged particles that bomb the planet during solar storms.
“We are trying to understand how that gate opens and how energy pours out,” said dr. Walsh.
Blue Ghost has already left a lasting impression.
Maria Banks said that while leaving the mission operating center every night, he raised the moon hanging on the sky.
“Which would basically stop me in my tracks every day,” said dr. Banks. “I don’t think I will ever see the moon again the same, because for the rest of my life, the Firefly lander and our tools will be up there.”