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Nasa has released the first high-definition images of a sunset on the moon, two striking photographs taken by the private lander Blue Ghost that could offer scientists further clues to the mysterious phenomenon known as lunar horizon glow.
The agency presented the images to a press conference on Tuesday at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, marking the conclusion of a 14-day mission conducted in partnership with Texas company Firefly Aerospace.
The commercial lander, which touched down on 2 March near Mons Latreille, a volcanic formation in Mare Crisium on the moon’s north-eastern near side, is part of a $2.6bn investment by Nasa in commercial payload operators aiming to cut costs and support Artemis, the program scheduled to return humans to the moon in 2027.
The two images, taken to the west and with Earth and Venus also visible, show the spread of the glow along moon’s horizon as the sun appears about halfway set.
“These are the first high-definition images taken of the sun going down and then going into darkness at the horizon,” said Joel Kearns, Nasa’s deputy associate administrator for exploration, science mission directorate.
“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 its 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.”
Lunar horizon glow was first documented by the astronaut Eugene Cernan, one of the last two men to set foot on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Subsequent observations concluded that the phenomenon was due to tiny dust particles in the moon’s thin atmosphere glowing at lunar sunrise and sunset, while some theories suggest the particles levitated.
Blue Ghost also captured high-definition imagery of a total eclipse on 14 March, when the Earth blocked the sun from the moon’s horizon.
A SpaceX Falcon rocket launched the lander, which is about the size of a hippopotamus, on a 2.8-mile journey on 15 January. Blue Ghost was carrying an array of scientific experiments, including a lunar soil analyzer, a radiation-tolerant computer and an experiment testing the feasibility of using the existing global satellite navigation system to navigate the moon.
“Firefly Aerospace is extremely proud to have accomplished this first fully successful commercial moon landing,” Jason Kim, the company’s chief executive, said.
“I truly believe Firefly and Blue Ghost’s historic mission will be a new chapter in textbooks and become a beacon of what humanity can achieve.”
A separate mission by a private company to land a spacecraft carrying scientific equipment on the moon ended in failure earlier this month when the Athena probe launched by Intuitive Machines toppled upon landing and was declared dead.
