Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Image credit: Firefly Aerospace

After touchdown in early March within the moon’s Mare Crisium impact basin, the Firefly Aerospace lunar lander became an on-duty robotic scientist.

Kicking up dust and rocks, the Blue Ghost Mission-1’s full-stop arrival on March 2 marked the start of executing NASA-backed Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) instruments.

The Moon lander wrapped up more than 14 days of surface operations (346 hours of daylight) and operated just over 5 hours into the super-chilly lunar night – check mark accomplishments after performing the first fully successful commercial Moon landing.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander captured the Moon in the distance and Earth on the horizon from its top deck, showing the LEXI payload and X-band antenna.
Image credit: Firefly Aerospace

One of those investigations involved a distinctive deep dive into studying the interior of the Moon.

Get ready for the answers.

Go to my new Space.com story – “Private lunar landing: How Blue Ghost measured the Moon’s electric and magnetic fields” – at:

https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/private-lunar-landing-how-blue-ghost-measured-the-moons-electric-and-magnetic-fields

Specialists test fire an electrode to evaluate hardware used on the moon to measure electrical fields. (Image credit: SwRI/Space.com screengrab)