Moon-Bound Spacecraft Captures Beautiful Photo of Earth – PetaPixel

A private spacecraft heading to the Moon has snapped an awesome photo of Earth — showing the planet as a “blue marble” glowing against the vast emptiness of space.Blue Ghost, a lunar lander designed by Firefly Aerospace and hired by NASA to deliver scientific experiments to the Moon, snapped the photo as it gears up for its inaugural attempt at a lunar landing.The striking Earth photos were captured during Blue Ghost’s second engine burn — a critical milestone on its journey to the Moon. After two more weeks of circling Earth, the spacecraft will execute its Trans Lunar Injection, a pivotal maneuver that propels it onto a Moon-bound trajectory.Our #GhostRiders captured the beauty of our home planet during another Earth orbit burn. This second engine burn (and first critical burn) adjusted Blue Ghost’s apogee (the furthest point from Earth) using just our Spectre RCS thrusters. With just over two weeks left in Earth… pic.twitter.com/I1KBVEJSyy— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) January 24, 2025 For the team behind the mission, the first successful engine burn was an emotional moment. “The moment that we completed the maneuver was really special for everybody. I don’t think anybody quite believed what they were looking at for the first few seconds,” says engine manager Ryan Cole, per Mashable. “Everything looks healthy right now.”Blue Ghost is the first of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions this year. The American space agency has poured $2.6 billion into contracts with private vendors, aiming to establish regular lunar missions in preparation for human-led Artemis expeditions, which may happen in 2027. Onboard Blue Ghost are 10 NASA experiments designed to gather vital data about the Moon’s environment. However, lunar landings remain a formidable challenge. Unlike Earth, the Moon lacks an atmosphere to slow incoming spacecraft. Last year, a Japanese craft crash-landed on the Moon and lost contact. Hopefully, Blue Ghost will successfully land on the Moon and when it does, it aims to become the first spacecraft to photograph a sunset from the Moon’s perspective. Here on Earth, we are used to the Sun rising and roughly 12 hours later it sets again. But sunset and sunrise work differently on the Moon: one lunar day lasts roughly 29.5 Earth days (the amount of time it takes the Moon to complete one full rotation on its axis). That means when the Sun rises on the Moon, it doesn’t go away again for another 14 Earth days.The Apollo missions were timed so that the crew landed on the lunar surface at the start of that two-week window giving them plenty of time to carry out their scientific work. But all of this is to say that no one knows what a sunset on the Moon actually looks like.Image credits: Firefly AerospaceBecome a PetaPixel Member and access our content ad-free.© 2025 PetaPixel Inc. All rights reserved.

Source: https://petapixel.com/2025/01/27/blue-ghost-captures-earth-blue-marble/