NASA is sending an exciting mission to the Moon on board a commercial lander, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1. The lander is carrying ten scientific instruments, most of them to study the Moon, but one is going to look back at our planet: the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI).

LEXI will take pictures of Earth, focusing on the low-energy X-rays that form when the electrically charged particles in the solar wind interact with our planet’s magnetic field. This happens at the edge of the magnetosphere. For its expected six days of operation, LEXI has a unique viewpoint to capture it.

“We’re trying to get this big picture of Earth’s space environment,” Brian Walsh, a space physicist at Boston University and LEXI’s principal investigator, said in a statement. “A lot of physics can be esoteric or difficult to follow without years of specific training, but this will be science that you can see.”

The work of LEXI might seem short, but it will provide very important information about the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetosphere – in particular, how the magnetosphere changes in response to the strength of the solar wind. Since the Sun is experiencing peak activity, this is an incredible opportunity to study the magnetosphere.

“We expect to see the magnetosphere breathing out and breathing in, for the first time,” added Hyunju Connor, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the NASA lead for LEXI. “When the solar wind is very strong, the magnetosphere will shrink and push backward toward Earth, and then expand when the solar wind weakens.”

LEXI is the second life of an instrument previously known as STORM that was launched on a sounding rocket in 2012. Following that, it sat in a display case at NASA Goddard. When the call came out to propose Commercial Lunar Payload Services projects, the team knew what to do.

“We’d break the glass — not literally — but remove it, restore it, and refurbish it, and that would allow us to look back and get this global picture that we’ve never had before,” Walsh said.

Part of the optics and other components had to be replaced, but the instrument was in remarkably good shape, and it is now ready to fly again.

Firefly Aerospace has stated that the expected launch time for Blue Ghost Mission 1 is 1:11 am EST on January 15, 2025.