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    Private lunar lander Blue Ghost falls silent on the moon after a 2-week mission
    Space

    Private lunar lander Blue Ghost falls silent on the moon after a 2-week mission

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    1. rocketwikkit on

      Good work, Firefly. I think a lot of people in the industry weren’t sure what to think of it give the… recurring drama of the company, but from the outside the mission looked really good.

      Now ispace! Would be great to have two successes this year.

    2. 42Franker on

      “The end came as the sun set at the moon, no longer providing energy for the lander’s solar panels.”

      Why won’t the lander regain connection when it receives sunlight again in the next week two?

    3. peter303_ on

      Temperatures fall to -200 F during the two week lunar night. Electronics have to be fortified for that temperature or heated from batteries. All the Apollo missions arrived in lunar morning to have two to seven days of sunlight.

    4. be_nice_2_ewe on

      Wasn’t firefly designed to only last about this long? This was sort of a test to pave the way for future missions?

    5. HungryKing9461 on

      There’s an implication in that headline that this was unexpected.

      This was entirely expected as the sun set on the lander after the 2-week “daytime” on the moon.  It now goes into 2-weeks of night, and very cold temperatures of around -183°C (-297°F), so it’s not likely to survive. 

      It _might_ though.  But it’s expected that it won’t, and thus the planned mission was only 2 weeks.

    6. IM_NOT_NOT_HORNY on

      So wtf did it get pics from the eclipse at all??

      One of humanities goals needs to be to get pics and footage from the moon facing earth during a full lunar eclipse…

      Think about it… Suddenly that last bit of sunlight falls behind the horizon of earth and suddenly the red ring appears like a total solar eclipse almost… Except 4x bigger in the sky, you’d just see a MASSIVE hole black circle with a red ring around earth from the refracting atmosphere… It’d be insane

      I wonder how much moon surface temps drop when it happens too. Even during that total solar eclipse earlier this year when the umbra hit us the clouds just disappeared so fast like a time lapse just because the lack of sun for a few minutes caused such an instant temp drop in the clouds they just condensed almost instantly.

      Just shows you how insanely important the sun is… Even a few seconds without it during the day and everything gets wacky