Firefly's Blue Ghost landed on the moon on March 2, the first private spacecraft to touch down upright on the moon's surface and perform its entire mission. It kept taking pictures and collecting scientific data five hours into the lunar night before it died of lack of solar energy.
NASA's Joel Kearns said the images captured by Blue Ghost are the first high-definition photos of the sun setting on the lunar surface.
Scientists will need to analyze them in depth, he noted, before making any determination about the horizon glow captured in at least one of the photos and whether it was created by levitating dust. That theory was put forth more than a half-century ago by Apollo 17's Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon.
"What we've got is a really beautiful, aesthetic image showing some really unusual features," Kearns said at a news conference.
Blue Ghost carried out 10 experiments for NASA under the space agency's commercial lunar delivery program. While all the objectives of the mission were met to some extent, the lander's onboard drill could only penetrate 3 feet (1 meter) into the moon versus the 10 feet (3 meters) that had been planned.
Scientists are eager to examine the photos of the phenomenon known as "lunar horizon glow," which was first documented in 1972 by one of the last men to have set foot on the moon's surface, Eugene Cernan, during the Apollo 17 mission.
"These are the first high-definition images taken of the sun going down and then going into darkness at the horizon," said Joel Kearns, NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration, science mission directorate. "The images themselves are beautiful, they're really aesthetic, but I know there are a bunch of folks looking at them now that study the moon ... Now it's time for the specialists in the field to examine it and compare it to the other data we have from the mission and see what conclusions they can propose and draw from."
Jason Kim, the company's chief executive, said he was extremely proud the company was able to achieve it's first fully successful commercial moon landing.
"I truly believe Firefly and Blue Ghost's historic mission will be a new chapter in textbooks and become a beacon of what humanity can achieve," Kim said.
