A team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, has captured first-of-its-kind imagery of a lunar lander’s engine plumes interacting with the Moon’s surface, a key piece of data as trips to the Moon increase in the coming years under the agency’s Artemis campaign.

The Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS) 1.1 instrument took the images during the descent and successful soft landing of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander on the Moon’s Mare Crisium region on March 2, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

Includes a YouTube video

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[–] Aequitas38472@lemm.ee 4 points 6 days ago (5 children)

Very cool footage.

They say it captured “exactly what they were looking for”. I’m curious what that would be, other than, “whoa that looks cool!”

What scientific benefit would they gain from this footage that they don’t already have?

[–] aushtan@lemm.ee 1 points 6 days ago

Maybe they found ice in one of those craters. I think that was their reason for going in the first place.

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