Shortly after landing, Blue Ghost sent back this stunning photo of its own shadow with the Earth above the lunar horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace
The Blue Ghost lunar lander finished surface operations on March 16, 2025, wrapping up a smashing success of a mission. Designed, built, and flown by Firefly Aerospace, based near Austin, Texas, Blue Ghost executed a flawless two-month-long voyage, capped by a stunning landing and two weeks of operations at Mare Crisium.
The success of the mission — named Ghost Riders in the Sky, presumably after the 1979 Johnny Cash hit — is all the more impressive as it was Firefly’s first attempt at landing on the Moon.
Recent history shows that even 55 years after Apollo, robotic lunar landings are still risky and difficult. Just two weeks ago, Houston-based Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission ended in a crash landing in a crater, the company’s second consecutive landing to go sideways. And landers from Russia, India, Israel, and Japan, have all crashed in recent years. (On the other hand, all four of China’s lunar landings have been a huge success and subsequent Indian and Japanese landings have achieved better results.)
Firefly’s success right out the gate is also welcome news to NASA, which paid the company $93.3 million to deliver a suite of scientific payloads as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services CLPS program. Four CLPS missions have now flown, including two by Intuitive Machines. Of them, Ghost Riders in the Sky is the only one that has been fully successful.
A picture-perfect landing
The gold-foil-covered 6.6-foot-high (2 meters) Blue Ghost lander spans 11.5 feet (3.5 m) across its landing legs and has a mass of 3,344 pounds (1,517 kilograms) when fully fueled. For good luck, the lander’s frame was personally signed by Apollo moonwalkers Buzz Aldrin and Harrison Schmidt.
The Ghost Riders in the Sky mission was managed by the Firefly Mission Operations Center in Cedar Park, near Austin, Texas. As a born and raised Texan, I asked Firefly Aerospace if Blue Ghost carried a Texas flag. Not on this mission, they replied, but future missions will do so. The Lone Star flag will be among the stars!
After launching atop a Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15, 2025, Blue Ghost did not dash directly to the Moon like the Apollo missions. Instead, it slowly spiraled out to the Moon in a lazy energy-saving trajectory before dropping into lunar orbit on Feb. 13. Over the next 17 days, the craft slowly lowered itself into a 62-mile-high (100 km) circular orbit. At 2:34 a.m. Central Time on March 2, the lander performed a picture-perfect autonomous landing near Mons Latreille on eastern Mare Crisium. This 387-mile-wide (620 kilometers) lunar sea on the Man in the Moon’s right cheek was not explored by NASA’s Surveyor and Apollo missions in the last century.
A landing video released by Firefly showed Blue Ghost’s shadow becoming visible at an altitude of 91 feet (28 meters) as it slowly descended to the surface. Soon, an astonishingly violent swirling dust storm whipped up by rocket exhaust turned into a horizon-obscuring haze. With shocking swiftness after the engine shut down, the dust settled quickly in the airless lunar environment to reveal a stone hurled toward the horizon, splashing into the dust to the left of the lander’s shadow.
Upon touchdown, the first of the 10 lunar surface experiments was already a success. NASA’s Langley Research Center provided the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plumes Surface Studies (SCALPSS), a six-camera suite that recorded 3,000 frames of video studying how the blast from rocket exhaust reacted with the loose lunar dust and regolith. Even half a century after the Apollo crewed landing, the dynamics of rocket exhaust impinging on the regolith are not fully understood. The SCALPSS experiment is thus vital to assist the planned Artemis crewed landing later this decade.
A scientific bounty
As a frequent visitor to the Space Sciences Division at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in my hometown of San Antonio, I was particularly interested in the Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) experiment developed by SwRI. Magnetotellurics measures the natural variation in surface electrical and magnetic fields to determine how easily electricity flows through a planetary body. Robert Grimm, the instrument’s principal investigator, noted in a statement that scientists have used magnetotellurics on Earth for more than 50 years to search for oil, water, and other resources, “as well as to understand geologic processes such as the growth of continents.”
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A delightful video released by Firefly showed the deployment of LMS’s softball-sized magnetotelluric sensors. Like an outfielder hurling the game-winning ball toward home plate, Blue Ghost heaved the sensors and their trailing electrical cable more than 60 feet (18 m) away from the lander. The LMS experiment is expected to provide insights into how the Moon cooled and how its minerals were distributed into separate regions and layers to a depth of 700 miles (1,120 km), or about two-thirds of the Moon’s radius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxeb79E5RLY
A growing concern for future lunar exploration is the static-cling effect of lunar dust. The Electrodynamic Dust Shield experiment demonstrated an electrical technique to sweep away lunar dust away from vital spacecraft components.
Another fascinating experiment provided by the Italian Space Agency was the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) that investigated whether signals from global navigation satellite systems like GPS can also be used to navigate on the Moon. The LuGRE receiver was able to pick up signals from the U.S.-run GPS as well as Europe’s Galileo system both on the way to the Moon and from the lunar surface. This shows that the same satnav signals that allow our smartphones to guide us to the grocery store can also help future lunar explorers navigate the Moon’s surface.
After the disappointing cancellation of the VIPER mission to the lunar south pole and the crash of the drill-carrying Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission, it was good to see Ghost Riders in the Sky perform two experiments that touched and sampled the lunar surface. Soon after landing, the Lunar PlanetVac (LPV) experiment prepared by Honeybee Robotics successfully demonstrated that regolith can be gathered into a sample-return container using pressurized nitrogen gas. And in a collaboration between Honeybee and Texas Tech University, the Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) experiment successfully drilled into the lunar regolith to place a temperature probe. Fascinating video of the drilling operation showed rock chips and sparks being ejected as the pneumatic drill bored into the surface.
That’s a wrap
Four days after landing, eight of the 10 planned science objectives had been met, and the experiments were powered down to help cool the lander under the 250-degree-Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius) lunar noontime Sun. The experiments restarted later in the lunar day when the temperature dropped.
An intriguing event that was not an official science objective was the March 14/15 total lunar eclipse. As seen from the Blue Ghost lander, which was then operating on Mare Crisium, this event was a total solar eclipse. A video beaming from the Moon showed the Earth slowly pass in front of the Sun, bathing the lander in the eerie red glow of Earth’s umbral shadow during totality. During the 2 hours 16 minutes of totality, the Earth appeared as a ring in the lunar sky as sunlight was refracted around our planet’s limb by its atmosphere. During totality, the local temperature at Mare Crisium plunged from 104 F to –274 F (40 C to –170 C).
The Blue Ghost lander is not expected to survive the lunar night, but its scientific legacy will keep researchers pondering the Moon’s mysteries for a long time. Firefly’s flawless first attempt at a lunar landing is a stark contrast to previous commercial failures. Next year’s planned landing of another Blue Ghost on the farside of the Moon will reveal whether Firefly’s initial success was beginner’s luck or the first flight of a reliable, robust lunar lander.
