NASA and Firefly Aerospace have released the first high-definition photos of a lunar sunset from the Moon. The striking images, some of which show Earth and Venus in the distance, were taken by the private lander Blue Ghost and presented during a press conference Tuesday (March 18) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston—the celebratory end of a 14-day mission.
“These images, captured by different camera angles and stitched together in a video, show a horizon glow that comes to life just above the Moon’s surface as the sun goes down,” Firefly wrote on their website. On social media, they took a more casual tone, enthusing, “Sunsets hit differently on the Moon!”
Blue Ghost launched in January from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and Artemis campaign. It touched down March 2 on the Moon’s northeastern near side near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature in the Mare Crisium region, and delivered 10 NASA science and technology instruments, capturing videos and photos during the two-week mission before going silent due to a lack of solar energy. According to The Associated Press, it became the first private spacecraft to land upright and perform its full mission.
“We’re incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled from tracking GPS signals on the Moon for the first time to robotically drilling and collecting science deeper into the lunar surface than ever before,” said Firefly CEO Jason Kim in a statement. “We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the Moons, Mars, and beyond.”
Joel Kearns, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, described the sunset photos as “the first high-definition images taken of the sun going down and then going into darkness at the horizon,” The Guardian reports. “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.”
The imagery, per Firefly, will help NASA determine “whether lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow,” which was hypothesized by Gene Cernan—one of the two humans to most recently step foot on the Moon, during the Apollo 17 mission from December 1972.
NASA aims to continue a pace of two private lunar landers each year, with the understanding that some missions will fail, The AP reports. “It really does open up a whole new way for us to get more science to space and to the Moon,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, NASA Science Mission Directorate.
In February 2020, NASA Goddard’s YouTube channel posted an incredible video that, using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, approximates what the Apollo 13 astronauts saw while flying around the far side of the Moon. “Nearly brings a tear to my eye,” wrote one viewer.
