Blue Ghost to Capture Solar Eclipse from the Moon
Nearly Two Hours of Totality will be Observable from Mare Crisium
Blue Ghost, the Firefly Aerospace lunar lander, will witness a rare eclipse from the Moon tomorrow. This marks the first time in history a commercial company will be actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface.
The eclipse will last nearly 5 hours starting at 12 am CST through 4:52 am CST at Firefly’s landing site in Mare Crisium and will include approximately 2 hours and 16 minutes of totality, starting at 1:18 am CST. Although not a mission requirement, Firefly hopes to image the eclipse and potentially operate NASA instruments to measure changes in the lunar environment from our unique vantage point on the Moon.
Back here on Earth, we’ll all witness a different phenomenon that happens simultaneously – a lunar eclipse, also known as a Blood Moon, where Earth moves between the sun and the Moon, causing the Moon to be completely shadowed by Earth and appear red.
In contrast, Blue Ghost will witness a glowing ring of sunlight when the Earth blocks the sun above the Moon’s horizon. This ring may also appear red as the sunlight refracts through the Earth’s atmosphere. Firefly aims to capture this with a wide-lens camera on Blue Ghost’s top deck, so the glowing ring will likely appear fairly small in the distance, similar to the size of Earth captured by Blue Ghost upon landing on the Moon.
Capturing this footage requires Blue Ghost to rely on its batteries for power rather than its solar panels, so it will be a challenge to image during the darkness of the eclipse, but Firefly Aerospace says it hopes to capture this incredible phenomenon and share it with the world.
Earlier this week, Blue Ghost performed ongoing LISTER operations over the past week. 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.