A Small Blue-Gray Marble

A photograph taken from a lander on the Moon's surface shows the lander's shadow, a barren lunar landscape, and Earth as a small gray orb on the horizon.

March 2, 2025

In 1968, as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, astronaut Bill Anders captured one of the most iconic images of all time: Earthrise. The photo, showing Earth as a vibrant blue-and-white sphere emerging over the barren surface of the Moon, helped propel a nascent environmental movement and changed NASA’s and humanity’s perception of our home planet.

“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth,” Anders later said of his journey. “Earth was the only thing in color. Everything else was black or white. It was the only thing that had any life to it.”

Now, more than half a century later, a new image taken from the surface of the Moon offers a fresh perspective on the theme. The new “blue ghost” photograph shows a small gray Earth drifting in the cosmic expanse beyond the flat, lifeless surface of the Moon.

The new photo was taken on March 2, 2025, after the Blue Ghost lander—a 1,034-pound (469-kilogram) spacecraft built by Firefly Aerospace—gently touched down on the powdery regolith of Mare Crisium. This dark feature in the Moon’s northeast quadrant formed when basaltic lava filled an ancient impact crater billions of years ago. Since the feature is close to the edge of the visible disk when viewed from Earth, it comes into view on a waxing crescent Moon and remains prominent until soon after a full Moon.

Blue Ghost, named after a rare type of firefly found in the U.S. Southeast, landed in Mare Crisium six weeks after a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched the probe from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The new photograph, taken soon after sunrise, shows a faint, almost spectral view of Earth beyond the lander’s shadow. Unlike the crisp details in Earthrise, where swirling clouds and continents are visible, Earth appears as more of an apparition—our gas-rich atmosphere scattering light in a way that makes the planet look opaque and monochromatic.

A photograph taken while the Blue Ghost mission was en route to the Moon shows oceans and clouds in part of Earth's Southern Hemisphere and the Moon as a small speck in the foreground.

February 12, 2025

The photo was taken with a high-definition commercial off-the-shelf digital camera with a wide fisheye lens with little to no zoom, making Earth appear small, a Firefly Aerospace spokesperson explained. “In contrast, Bill Anders was in orbit and using a 250-millimeter telephoto lens when he took the Earthrise photograph, so Earth looked relatively large,” said Olivia Tyrrell, an optical engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Tyrrell is a member of the science team for SCALPSS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies), one of ten scientific payloads aboard Blue Ghost.

Earth, however, looked much bluer and larger in other photographs taken during Blue Ghost’s journey to the Moon. On February 12, a Firefly Aerospace camera captured the remarkable image (above) of part of Earth’s Southern Hemisphere and the Moon a few days after trans-lunar injection, a maneuver that altered the spacecraft’s orbit and put it on a trajectory for the Moon. At the time, the spacecraft was much closer to Earth than the Moon, so the Moon appears as a mere speck in the photo. On Earth, ice sheets covering Antarctica and a tropical cyclone churning in the Indian Ocean are visible.

Around the same time, Firefly Aerospace’s cameras looked back home and captured an image (below) of Earth’s clouds and part of Australia, also visible in the reflections off the mission’s solar panels (foreground).

A camera on board the Blue Ghost mission looked back at Earth while on the way to the Moon and took this photograph showing part of Australia and clouds swirling in the Southern Hemisphere. The Earth is reflected on a solar panel in the foreground.

February 12, 2025

The mission’s X-band antenna and LEXI (Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager), a NASA telescope designed to study Earth from the Moon, are shown in the center of the image. Scientists will use the telescope to study how Earth’s atmosphere responds to space weather, or variations in the conditions in space caused by solar activity such as flares and coronal mass ejections.

For six Earth days during the Blue Ghost mission, LEXI will collect images of X-rays emanating from the edges of Earth’s sprawling magnetosphere. These images will help researchers track how the protective boundary reacts to space weather and other cosmic forces and sometimes allows streams of charged solar particles into Earth’s atmosphere, creating auroras and potentially damaging infrastructure.

The Blue Ghost lander was designed to operate for about one lunar day, equivalent to 14 Earth days. The mission is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, a partnership between NASA and several American companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface.