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
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?
I didn’t read the article, just watched the video. But my guess is dynamic interactions of the exhaust gases with the regolith. I don’t think it’s something there’s much data about. Without a landing pad, a landing of a full Starship may be a risky business. Of course the landing thrusters on the tip should help a lot, but still. And now that I think about it, the launch from the surface might be worrying as well. We’ve seen what Super Heavy did to a robust concrete slab without a deflector. Starship is nowhere near that powerful, but regolith is no concrete, and you preferably don’t want flying debris damaging your engines when you’re trying to come back from the Moon.
what about leaving the bottom half of the lander as a launch pad? Isn’t that what Apollo did? The descent stage doubled as a launch pad. Grandpa engineered the separators for that part…
Well, the currently approved lander is a modified starship simply standing on some legs. Your solution would work, but it isn’t what will happen during Artemis. Not with the money available (other options were much more expensive), and even if there was more money, almost certainly not under current administration.
My interpretation is they are using the data to see what went right with the landing (terrain, speed, altitude, when to fire braking engines, etc…) in the hopes of being able to reproduce safe landings on a consistent basis. Keep in mind the vast majority of landings still crash, and that can’t happen when humans get up there.
In other words, you can’t be good unless you know what good looks like. Since this landing was a success, they want to know what contributed to that so they can do it again instead of say…using the same design that made your previous lander topple over…ahem…
Maybe they found ice in one of those craters. I think that was their reason for going in the first place.