Telescope designed to image Earth’s protective shield will be the first BU-engineered device to land on a celestial body

By Jessica Colarossi

After 40 days of traveling through space, a shiny, golden spacecraft gently lands on the surface of the moon. The autonomous moon lander, with 10 aerospace instruments onboard, faces Earth—238,855 miles away. As the dust beneath it settles, a clear view of our home planet emerges. The scientists who have spent years preparing for this moment, eagerly awaiting its arrival and ready to view Earth in a whole new way, can finally breathe.

That’s how Boston University engineer Brian Walsh hopes the landing of NASA’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 will unfold in the coming weeks. One of the instruments hitching a ride on the Blue Ghost lander is a telescope created by Walsh and his team. The Lunar Environment heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI) will be the first BU-created device to ever land on another planetary body.

Although LEXI hasn’t left the atmosphere yet, the lander is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida between January 15 and 17. For now, Walsh and his collaborators are bracing themselves for Blue Ghost—designed by private company Firefly Aerospace and commissioned by NASA—to blast off.

“LEXI will image, for the first time, the boundary of Earth’s magnetic field,” says Walsh, a BU College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering. Those images will reveal how that field deflects the constant flow of solar wind and high-speed charged particles emanating from the sun—an electromagnetic interaction that has allowed life on Earth to exist.

Read the full story at BU’s The Brink.