NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter managed to capture a photo of Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander on the surface of the Moon, in a stunning instance of the orbiter’s surveillance power.
Ghosts are notoriously hard to photograph, and this (very real) commercial spacecraft is no different. Blue Ghost landed on the Moon early Sunday morning, finishing a 45-day journey to our rocky satellite. The lander touched down in Mare Crisium (which literally translates to “Sea of Crises”), a crater formed by an ancient asteroid impact on the Moon. Remarkable landing footage from Blue Ghost itself was revealed yesterday, showing the lunar surface in sharp relief.
LRO took the image when it was roughly 109 miles (175 kilometers) east of the Blue Ghost landing site; the image was taken with the orbiter’s Narrow Angle Cameras on March 2, 2025.
If you were expecting a high-res image of the lander you may be in for a disappointment. The NASA LRO image was taken from lunar orbit, so it’s hard to spot the little lander—it’s actually a single pixel in the image above. If you look closely, the Blue Ghost is the white splotch casting a shadow in the middle of the box. The base of Mons Latreille, a lunar mountain in Mare Crisium, can be seen in the lower left corner of the full image.
The lunar lander’s mission is dubbed Ghost Riders in the Sky and involves 10 NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) demonstration instruments. You can keep up to date with the lander’s first mission on the Firefly website.
Since the lander touched down on the lunar surface, it has begun deploying its payloads, sampling Moon rock (or regolith), and taking additional photos from the surface. It will spend two weeks (a lunar day) analyzing the topside of our satellite, using NASA instruments that will help scientists understand the Moon in preparation for a more sustained human presence on its surface.
