Photos: Lunar lander gets rare view of eclipse from the moon
The Brief
Friday morning's blood moon lunar eclipse appeared, from Earth, to turn the moon dark red.
From the moon, the Earth appeared to block out the sun.
The unique view was captured by Firefly's Blue Ghost lunar lander.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - While Earthlings were watching the moon almost disappear during Friday morning's lunar eclipse, a robotic lander on the moon was looking back and getting a very different – and very rare – view.
Firefly's Blue Ghost lander captured nearly unprecedented images of what appeared, from its perspective in the moon's Mare Crisium, to be a total solar eclipse as Earth blocked out the sun.
A lunar eclipse happens when the Earth passes between the moon and the sun, blocking the sun's light from reaching the moon.
View from Earth
Seen from Earth, the moon gradually gets darker as our planet blocks more and more of the sun's light, eventually blocking it entirely for a brief time. Earth's atmosphere filters out the blue wavelengths of light, the moon takes on a reddish glow, leading to the "blood moon" nickname.
View from the moon
From the moon's perspective, it's the sun that's getting blocked. Blue Ghost's cameras captured a "diamond ring" phenomenon where just a sliver of the sun was visible outside of Earth's shadow, similar to what was observed on Earth during last year's solar eclipse.
Because of the extremely cold temperatures in the lunar darkness, the company had to wait until the lander's antenna warmed back up before transmitting the images. Later Friday, they shared a time-lapse video showing the red hue cast by the eclipse, as seen from the lander.
Dig deeper
Blue Ghost's photos, while remarkable, aren't the first such images of an eclipse from the moon. NASA's Surveyor 3 lunar probe managed to capture the first-ever view of a solar eclipse from another celestial body during the April 1967 lunar eclipse. In 2009, Japan's Kaguya spacecraft took better images of a similar eclipse while orbiting the moon.
The quality of Blue Ghost's images, though, clearly eclipses the grainy black and white shots from that 1967 event.
The backstory
Blue Ghost is a lunar lander built by Firefly Aerospace to carry NASA payloads to the moon as part of the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
After blasting off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket in January, the robotic lander touched down on the lunar surface March 2, kicking off what was expected to be about a two-week mission utilizing 10 different NASA instruments onboard.
Blue Ghost became the first privately funded craft to land successfully upright on the moon. Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander toppled over and ended up on its side while landing last year, and an identical fate befell the company's Athena lander again last week.
The Source
Information in this story came from NASA, Firely Aerospace's X account, FOX Weather, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and previous FOX Television Stations reporting.
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