NASA made a bet a few years ago that commercial companies could take scientific experiments to the moon on a lower budget than the agency could.777-ceia777
Last year, that was a bad bet. The first NASA-financed spacecraft missed the moon entirely. The second landed but fell over.
But this month, a robotic lander named Blue Ghost, built by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas, succeeded from start to finish.
On March 16, the mood at Firefly’s mission operations outside Austin was a mix of happy and melancholic. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing left to do — except watch the company’s spacecraft die.
A quarter-million miles away, the sun had already set on Mare Crisium, the lunar lava plain where Blue Ghost had collected scientific observations for two weeks.
811betFor the solar-powered spacecraft, the hours remaining were numbered and few.
ImageThe sun has set on the Blue Ghost spacecraft, ending a successful mission to the moon.
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Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.
But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.
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