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
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…