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–>Landing<!–>
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[–><!–>Several companies and countries have aimed to land on the moon in recent years. The map below shows the crewed Apollo moon landing sites, as well as more recent robotic landings from China, India, Japan and commercial companies. Recent crash sites from failed landings are also shown.–><!–>
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[–><!–>China has a 100 percent success rate with four successful Chang’e robotic landings, but many other missions have crashed.–><!–>
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[–><!–>The failures include Hakuto-R Mission 1, from Ispace, a Japanese company; Beresheet, from an Israeli nonprofit; Luna 25, from Russia; and Chandrayaan-2, from India. (India’s second try, Chandrayaan-3, was successful.)–><!–>
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[–><!–>Three other landers — SLIM, from the Japanese space agency, and Odysseus and Athena, from Intuitive Machines of Houston — landed and communicated back to Earth, but their success came with an asterisk. All three toppled over after landing.–><!–>
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–>Experiments<!–>
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[–><!–>One of Blue Ghost’s payloads, PlanetVac, demonstrated a technology to simplify the collecting of soil and rocks. It fired a blast of gas into the ground, which propelled material into a container. This technology will be used on a Japanese mission, Martian Moons Exploration, which will collect samples from Phobos, a moon of Mars, and bring them back to Earth for study.–><!–>
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–>Solar Eclipse<!–>
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[–><!–>While people on Earth were taking in a blood moon and a total lunar eclipse on the evening of March 14, Blue Ghost witnessed and photographed a total solar eclipse.–><!–>
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–>Sunset<!–>
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[–><!–>Eugene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 who in 1972 was the last man to walk on the moon, sketched observations of a glow along the horizon before sunrise. However, that phenomenon is not easily explained because the moon lacks an atmosphere to scatter light.–><!–>
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–>Signoff<!–>
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[–><!–>This was the last message from the Blue Ghost spacecraft, about five hours after sunset:–><!–>
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[–><!–>The spacecraft was not designed to survive the bitter cold of the lunar night. But another lunar mission, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft, surprised engineers last year by riding out several lunar nights. In early April, after the sun rises again, Firefly will listen for radio messages from Blue Ghost, just in case it does revive.–><!–>
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