What does a solar eclipse look like from the moon? The NASA-supported ‘Blue Ghost’ spaceship will find out on March 29 — if it lands safely.
What does a total lunar eclipse look like from the moon? A NASA -supported spaceship could be about to find out if it's successful in landing on the moon in March 2025.
While there, the “Blue Ghost” lander—which will launch this coming week from Florida—will also investigate a mysterious glow seen on the moon by Apollo astronauts but never fully explained.During a lunar eclipse—which is next due on March 13/14, 2025—the Earth is precisely between the sun and a full moon. The Earth projects its shadow onto the lunar surface, and the only sunlight that gets to the lunar surface is filtered by Earth’s atmosphere, so it looks reddish like a sunset.
From the moon’s night side, facing Earth during a full moon, a 360-degree camera on Blue Ghost on the lunar surface will be used to image a halo of light around the Earth. “On Earth, we’d be looking at a lunar eclipse where the moon gets shadowed out, and on the moon, we’ll see a solar eclipse where the Earth blocks the sun,” said a spokesperson at Firefly Aerospace, in an email. “That’s what we aim to capture with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander.”This moon lander is not from NASA but from a commercial U.S. company called Firefly Aerospace.
This will be Firefly Aerospace's first mission to the moon, though it will only be able to perform science for one lunar day — equivalent to 14 Earth days. It is designed to have a big enough battery to enable it to image sunset from the moon before beginning a dark, cold fortnight.. “We expect to capture a phenomenon seen and documented by Eugene Cernan during his final steps on Apollo 17 where he observed a horizon glow as the lunar dust levitated on the surface,” said Kim.
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