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Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

cnn.com

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Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#181

Post by gwarrr »

pwnOrbitals wrote: post #99
gwarrr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.

Space engineer here, not exactly true, esp for non-critical systems. Check out the "Careful COTS" paper by Doug Sinclair

would be happy if someone would explain or differentiate "not exactly true"

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#182

Post by jandrese »

echoangle wrote: post #156
thinkingemote wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we get a taste of this light when out in the countryside when it's a full moon. Very bright but cold light. Full, hard shadows. Just black and white. No diffraction, no softness. It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.

How would that work? The hardness of the light on the moon is because the moon has no atmosphere. Moonlight at night is still affected by the atmosphere in the same way sunlight is.

It's because the moonlight is comparatively dim. Even when your eyes have fully adjusted there is a threshold below which you just can't pick up the light. The scattered moonlight is below your detection threshold so the shadows appear completely black. Your color cones are also less sensitive than the black and white rods, so colors are muted or even missing and you are left with a landscape of stark greys just like the moon.

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#183

Post by velcrovan »

chefandy wrote: post #61
consumer451 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting tangent. Is it Flickr's copyright rules that make it attractive? Or, something else? Lack of existing competitors? Not associated with a social media account?

If you’re going to post albums of high-res photographs on the internet… why not Flickr?

Because its continued existence has been in grave doubt for years?

I was a heavy Flickr user, but when Yahoo sold it to SmugMug in 2018, I basically assumed it was going to be either merged out of distinct existence or shuttered. I downloaded an archive of all my stuff and stopped using it altogether. Because what’s the point of using a platform that’s so obviously no longer viable…was my thinking at the time. I would never have guessed it would remain alive this long but it’s still not anything I would want to invest time in or rely on anymore.

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#185

Post by SoleilAbsolu »

decimalenough wrote: post #53
sfjailbird wrote: post #12

Here are the pictures it has taken so far: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031... There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.

It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.

Or...the Hollywood soundstage these are filmed on hasn't been updated since the '60s...j/k

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#186

Post by nonethewiser »

>About 14 days into the mission, Blue Ghost’s landing site will be plunged into lunar night. The lander will then need to rely on battery power as the company aims to keep it functioning in temperatures as cold as minus 250°F (minus 130°C).

Why not hibernate?

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#187

Post by nonethewiser »

dylan604 wrote: post #168
butlike wrote: post #166

What gets me is that the videos warp the perspective of the Earth in a way where it doesn't appear large anymore; and I wonder if that would happen with astronauts too. They break through the atmosphere and then all of a sudden it looks like a small globe when the point-of-reference switches to the blackness of space.

The moon is a long way away. The furthest man has ever been from terra firma. The Earth is small at that distance compared to images from ISS or even a geosync satellite. The distance to the moon is about 30 Earths for perspective, over 400,000 kilometers away. Here's a very famous image from Apollo 8: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/82693/earthrise-rev... For a different perspective, check out the view of e…

Earth in that image from the moon looks way bigger than the one he's talking about

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#188

Post by skeaker »

DeepSeaTortoise wrote: post #116
oxonia wrote: post #24

"At the end of its operations, Blue Ghost will stay put, destined to remain on the moon’s surface indefinitely." Is that a euphemism for "Humans are leaving rubbish to pollute another part of the universe?"

Way worse. Even when the moon is finally settled on, I guarantee you that nobody will make any effort to clean it up and throw it away. It is truely sad that we can be sure that even thousands of years in the future, despite millions of humans looking at it every day, people will rather put a glass box around it, so nobody is bothered by it, than just tossing it into the lunar landfill.

I think it's okay to be sentimental about our first steps into space travel.

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#189

Post by dylan604 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #187
dylan604 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moon is a long way away. The furthest man has ever been from terra firma. The Earth is small at that distance compared to images from ISS or even a geosync satellite. The distance to the moon is about 30 Earths for perspective, over 400,000 kilometers away. Here's a very famous image from Apollo 8: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/82693/earthrise-rev... For a different perspective, check out the view of e…

Earth in that image from the moon looks way bigger than the one he's talking about

Different lenses would be the obvious answer. The lander's imagery looks like wide angle lenses while the Apollo image was taken by a human using a 250mm lens. If you watch the video in the link you'll see all of this info. It even shows a recreation of what it would look like to the astronauts which makes the earth look much smaller in the images

Re: Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon

#190

Post by bongodongobob »

butlike wrote: post #166

What gets me is that the videos warp the perspective of the Earth in a way where it doesn't appear large anymore; and I wonder if that would happen with astronauts too. They break through the atmosphere and then all of a sudden it looks like a small globe when the point-of-reference switches to the blackness of space.

That just has to do with the lens size. The earth will be bigger using a 300mm zoom lens than a wide angle 17mm.
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