Name: NASA releases high-definition images of a sunset on the moon
Uploaded: 2025-03-22T00:52:53.000Z
Duration: 2 min 1 s
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America has now explored a new region of the moon that Americans have not seen before.

I think that Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 is what I would call an existence proof of how we wanted commercial lunar payload services to work.

In this case, NASA contracted with U.S. industry Firefly to take NASA's science and technology payloads to the surface of the moon, operate them, and bring our data back.

Firefly put together a mission, designed and built, and flew a lander and accomplished those objectives for NASA.

Now Blue Ghost has provided us this outstanding high-definition image and now it's time for the specialists in the field to examine it and compare it to the other data we have on the mission and see what conclusions they can propose and draw from it.

I think at this point what we've got is a really beautiful aesthetic image showing some really unusual features and the specialists have to really look at it and decide what conclusion they can draw from it.

We look forward to going through lunar night.

We don't expect to survive lunar night, but nonetheless, we're all engineers, we're all very curious, so we are going to try to turn the lander back on after lunar night and so we'll check back in in early April and see if we can get any more data.

As to our probability of turning back on after lunar night, I think it depends who you ask whether they're an optimist or a pessimist.

I will say that the lander is absolutely not designed to live through the extreme cold that will occur during lunar night and so I'd say the probability is very, very low that we do power back on.

With respect to Lister, I will say, and you are right, it did drill to about three feet deep, and I will say that they got as deep as they could within the operational opportunities that they had.

I think they ran into some challenges and probably expectations that were different with respect to the surface and what lies beneath, but again, they had multiple attempts and went as far as they could go.