NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.
Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.
But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.
On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.
A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.
For the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few.
“I think the mood generally is pretty light,” Ray Allensworth, the spacecraft program director at Firefly, said that afternoon. “I think people are just excited and also just kind of relieved to see how well the mission went and just kind of taking a moment to enjoy the last few hours with the lander.”
Scientists with cargo on the other commercial moon missions had invested years of effort and ended up with little or nothing. Those NASA assigned to Blue Ghost are coming away with a cornucopia of new data to work with.
Robert Grimm, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who led one of the scientific payloads, acknowledged his good fortune. “Better than being a crater,” he said.
One of the NASA experiments had collected data just as Blue Ghost landed. Four cameras captured views from different angles of the exhaust of the spacecraft’s thrusters as they kicked up lunar dust and carved a small crater.
“This gives us the ability with these cameras to measure three-dimensional shapes,” said Paul Danehy, one of the scientists working on the project known as Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies, or SCALPSS.
Engineers want to understand those dynamics to prevent potential disasters when bigger and heavier spacecraft like SpaceX’s Starship land astronauts on the moon. If NASA sets up a lunar outpost, spacecraft will return to that site more than once. Rocks flying upward could knock out an engine on a descending spacecraft or damage nearby structures.
In early looks at the photographs, one of the surprises is that the exhaust plume from the thrusters started kicking lunar dust when Blue Ghost was still about 50 feet above the surface, higher than expected. The same camera system is to record the dust cloud from a much larger lander, the Blue Moon Mark 1, which Blue Origin, 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 like shards of glass, posing a hazard to machinery and astronauts. An experiment on Blue Ghost called the Electrodynamic Dust Shield used electric fields to clean dust off surfaces.
Two experiments collected information that should cast light on the moon’s interior.
Dr. Grimm’s payload was the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder, the first of its kind deployed on the surface of another world.
To deploy, spring-loaded launchers flung four probes about the size of soup cans in four different directions. Connected by cables to the lander, the probes worked like supersized voltmeters. A second component, raised atop an eight-foot-high mast, measured magnetic fields.
Together, these readings reveal naturally occurring variations in electric and magnetic fields that tell how easily electric currents flow deep underground, and that tells something about what is down there. The conductivity of colder rocks, for example, is lower.
Blue Ghost also deployed a pneumatic drill, using bursts of nitrogen gas to excavate dirt. A needle at the end of the instrument measured temperature and how easily heat flows through the material. Because of rocks in the way, the drill went down only about three feet, not the 10 feet that had been hoped.
In videos, “you can see the rocks flying out and sparks,” said Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built the drill.
Still, three feet was deep enough for the scientific measurements, Dr. Zacny said. Data from the drill and the magnetotelluric sounder could both give hints about how the moon and other rocky worlds formed or why the near side of the moon looks so different from the far side.
“It’s really a basic question about lunar geology we’re trying to answer,” Dr. Grimm said.
Honeybee, which is part of Blue Origin, also built a second device called PlanetVac to demonstrate a simplified technology to collect samples. This device used compressed gas to stir up regolith into a small tornado and direct it into a container.
The technology will be used on a robotic Japanese space mission known as Martian Moons Exploration, which will bring back samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars.
“The fact that it worked on the moon gives us confidence that it should work on Phobos as well,” Dr. Zacny said.
Brian Walsh’s experiment on Blue Ghost did not look at the moon but back at Earth.
“It’s a really good vantage point,” said Dr. Walsh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Boston University.
Dr. Walsh is interested in the magnetic bubble that deflects solar wind particles around Earth. His telescope recorded X-rays emitted when high-speed particles from the sun slam into atoms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The boundary between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind is like two sumo wrestlers pushing against each other. The view from afar should help scientists tell whether that boundary shifts slowly or in sudden leaps.
That is important because it affects how well Earth’s magnetic field protects us from occasional gargantuan belches of charged particles that bombard the planet during solar storms.
“We’re trying to figure out how that gate opens and how energy spills through,” Dr. Walsh said.
Blue Ghost has already left a lasting impression.
Maria Banks said that as she left the mission operations center each night, she would look up at the moon hanging in the sky.
“Which would just basically stop me in my tracks 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 instruments will be up there.”
