A privately owned lunar module has captured its first high-quality images of a lunar sunset.
Firefly Aerospace and NASA shared photos Tuesday taken before the Blue Ghost lander stopped functioning over the weekend.
One of the frames captured Venus on the horizon.
Firefly's Blue Ghost landed successfully on the Moon on March 2, becoming the first privately owned spacecraft to land vertically and complete all of its missions.
It continued to take photographs and collect scientific data for five hours of lunar night before failing due to lack of solar power.
NASA's Joel Kearns noted that the series of sunset images taken by Blue Ghost are the first high-resolution images from our satellite.
He stressed that scientists would need to conduct a thorough analysis of them before drawing any conclusions about the horizon light captured in any of the images and whether it was caused by levitating dust.
This theory was proposed more than half a century ago by Apollo 17's Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon.
“We have a really beautiful, aesthetically pleasing image that shows some very unusual characteristics,” Mr Kearns said at a press conference.
Blue Ghost carried 10 experiments for NASA as part of its commercial lunar mission program.
While all tasks were completed, the onboard drill was only able to penetrate the moon 3 feet instead of the planned 10 feet, officials said.
Firefly said it would try to reactivate the lunar module in early April after two weeks of cold lunar night, although engineers are doubtful it will work again.
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
