See Last Week’s Stunning Eclipse From the Moon in Photos Captured by the Blue Ghost Lander, Now at the End of Its Mission
The spacecraft carried out the longest commercial operation on the moon to date—and also made history during its rare chance to document this celestial event
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In the early hours of March 14, people in the Americas experienced a stunning total lunar eclipse. But while the moon turned a fiery red in our skies, the Blue Ghost lunar lander was seeing a solar eclipse, as the Earth passed by the sun.
After touching down on the moon on March 2, Blue Ghost spent two weeks advancing science goals. The lander is now powered down, but before ending its mission, it got the rare chance to document this stunning celestial event from the moon.
“This is the first time in history a commercial company has ever been operational during an eclipse on the moon, and we’re incredibly proud of the imagery we’ve downlinked so far,” says Will Coogan, Blue Ghost’s chief engineer, in an email to CNN’s Taylor Nicioli.
Firefly Aerospace, the Texas-based company that built the Blue Ghost lunar lander, shared the spacecraft’s historic photos online. In one, Blue Ghost captured the “diamond ring” effect, which occurs when the sun’s light pokes through valleys or craters in the object eclipsing it, during the moments right before or after totality.
The lander also captured photos of the Earth blocking the sun from its vantage point. Those images took longer to come in, because engineers needed to wait for the device’s antenna to warm back up after a few hours of decreased light during the eclipse, according to a social media post from the company.
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When the sun “disappears” during totality, the lander can’t rely on its solar panels. “Operating for nearly five hours of darkness during a total eclipse is as challenging as operating during the lunar night—temperatures on the moon can quickly drop below minus 100 degrees Celsius (minus 148 degrees Fahrenheit), and there’s no sunlight to provide power,” Coogan explains to CNN. “The lander was solely running on battery power.”
That difficulty operating in darkness is why, on Sunday, when the sun set on the moon, it also marked the end of the lander’s two-week mission. After one lunar day on the moon’s surface, Blue Ghost’s journey is now over. Its mission was the longest commercial operation on the moon ever completed.
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“This team continues to make near-impossible achievements look easy, but there is no such thing as an easy moon landing, especially on your first attempt,” Coogan says in a statement.
Beyond photographing the eclipse, the lander tested various instruments and conducted experiments on the lunar surface, all of which were successful, according to the company. During the eclipse, three of those science payloads worked to measure changes in lunar dust and radiation.
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“Mission is completed,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim posted on X on Sunday night. “But the Ghost still lives on in our hearts and minds for the journey it’s taken us on!”
The company does not expect the lander to survive the lunar night, but engineers will check in on it around April 1, per Firefly Aerospace. They are hoping to make annual missions to the moon, with Blue Ghost Mission 2 slated for launch in 2026.
