When the Blue Ghost lander reached the lunar surface on March 2, Firefly Aerospace become the first commercial company to fully succeed in a soft moon landing at the first attempt.
A week on, and a team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia has just released first-of-its-kind footage of a lunar lander’s powerful engine plumes interacting with the moon’s surface, captured as the Blue Ghost touched down.
Coming in for a landing 🚀🌕
During last week's Moon landing, our SCALPSS cameras captured first-of-its-kind video of the lunar lander’s engine plumes interacting with the Moon’s surface.
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— NASA Langley Research Center (@NASA_Langley) March 13, 2025
The remarkable video was recorded by the lander’s Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) 1.1 instrument, which is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
The sequence starts around 91 feet (28 meters) above the lunar surface, with lunar dust beginning to kick up when the lander descends to about 49 feet (15 meters). The SCALPSS 1.1 technology comprises six cameras, four with a short focal length and two with a long focal length. The long-focal-length cameras started recording at a higher altitude, before the dust started to react, to give scientists some useful before-and-after data.
Michelle Munk, SCALPSS principal investigator, described SCALPSS as a “key step in gathering fundamental knowledge about landing and operating on the moon,” adding that the technology “is already providing data that could inform future missions.”
The work is particularly important as NASA and its commercial partners move toward increasing the frequency of lunar landings as part of the Artemis program.
The Blue Ghost mission, which will end on Sunday, has a number of objectives, including studying lunar regolith, testing new technologies for future missions, and conducting various scientific experiments, including the observation of Earth’s magnetic field from the moon. The Firefly team also hopes it will inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Want to see another video of the Blue Ghost touching down last week? Then check out this footage captured by a different camera on the lander.
