NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments on the moon with a lower budget than the organization could.
Last year, this was a bad bet. The first spacecraft funded by NASA completely lost the moon. The second landed, but it fell.
But this month, a robotic land called Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.
On March 16, the mood to Firefly’s shipping companies outside of Austin was a mixture of happy and melancholy. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing you should do – except to watch the company’s spacecraft.
A quarter million miles away, the sun had already placed Mare Crisium, Lunar Lava Plain, where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.
For the solar spacecraft, the remaining hours were numbered and few.
“I think the mood is generally quite light,” said Ray Allensworth, the director of the spacecraft program in Firefly in the afternoon. “I think people are just excited and also just relieved to see how well the mission went and just get some time to enjoy the last hours with the Lander.”
Scientists with a burden on other commercial moon missions had invested years of effort and ended up with little or nothing. These nasa assigned to Blue Ghost come away with a new data mooring to work together.
Robert Grimm, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute at Boulder, Colo, who led one of the scientific beneficial loads, recognized his good luck. “Better than being a crater,” he said.
One of NASA’s experiments had collected data just like Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras occupied views of different angles of the exhaust of the spacecraft as they kicked the lunar dust and carved a small crater.
“This enables us with these cameras to measure the three -dimensional shapes,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists working in the work known as stereo cameras for lunar surface studies or Scalpss.
Engineers want to understand these dynamics to prevent possible catastrophes when larger and heavier spacecraft, such as the SPACEX Stainhip Land astronauts on the moon. If NASA creates a lunar prison, the spacecraft will return to this site more than once. Rocks flying upwards could hit an engine on a descending spaceship or damage the nearby structures.
The photos are the photos, one of the surprises is that the exhausting exhausts from the promoters began kicking the lunar dust when the Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record the cloud of dust from a much larger Lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos rocket company, plans to send to the moon later this year.
NASA not only wants to understand lunar dust or regolith, but also how to get rid of it. The particles can be sharp and abrasive such as glass fragments, which create a risk for machinery and astronauts. An experiment on Blue Ghost called Electodynamic Dust Shield used electric fields to clean dust surfaces.
Two experiments gathered information that should have illuminated inside the moon.
Dr. Grimm was the lunar magnetic audio, the first of its kind that developed on the surface of another world.
To grow, spring launchers threw four detectors on the size of soup containers in four different directions. Connected with cables to the Lander, the detectors worked as overwhelmed voltmeters. A second ingredient, raised to the top of an eight -foot sailboat, magnetic fields were measured.
Together, these readings reveal natural variations in electric and magnetic fields that say how easily the electric currents flow deep underground and this says something about what is down there. The conductivity of the colder rocks, for example, is lower.
Blue Ghost also arrived a spiritual drill, using nitrogen gas explosions to dig dirt. A needle at the end of the body temperature measurement and how easily it is heated through the material. Due to the rocks on the road, the drill descended only about three feet, not the 10 feet they had hoped.
In the videos, “you can see the rocks flying outside and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, Vice President of Honeybee Robotics, who built the drill.
Still, the three legs were deep enough for scientific measurements, Dr. Zacny said. Drill data and magnetic audio could give both tips on how the moon and other rocky worlds were formed or because the nearby side of the moon looks so different from the distant side.
“It’s really a key question about the lunar geology we are trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm said.
Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, also created a second device called Planetvac to show a simplified technology for gathering samples. This device used compressed gas to mix the regolith into a small tornado and direct it in a container.
Technology will be used in a robotic Japanese space mission known as an exploration of Martian Moons, which will bring back samples from Phobos, a Mars moon.
“The fact that he worked on the moon gives us confidence that it must work for Phobos,” said Dr. Zacny.
Brian Walsh’s experiment on Blue Ghost did not look at the moon, but back to Earth.
“It’s a very good advantage,” said Dr. Walsh, a professor of engineering at the University of Boston.
Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that diverts the solar wind particles around the Earth. His telescope recorded x -rays emitted when high -speed particles hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The boundary between the magnetic field of the Earth and the solar wind is like two Sumo wrestlers pushing each other. The view from afar should help scientists report whether this limit is shifted late or suddenly jumps.
This is important because it affects how well the Earth’s magnetic field protects us from occasional giant shots from charged particles that bomb the planet during solar storms.
“We are trying to understand how this gate opens and how the energy flows,” Dr. Walsh said.
Blue Ghost has already left a permanent impression.
Maria Banks said that as she left the mission’s business center every night, she would see the moon hanging in the sky.
“That would basically stop me in my traces every day,” Dr. Banks said. “I don’t think I’ll ever see the moon the same again, because for the rest of my life, Firefly’s Lander and our organs will be there.”
