A private lunar lander from Japan crashed on Friday when an attempt to make a touchdown, the latest casualties from a commercial rave to the moon.
The Tokyo-based company, Ispace, announced the mission was a failure after a few hours of communication with Lander. The flight controllers scrambled to re-engage, but only encountered silence and said they were finishing the mission.
Communication stopped less than two minutes before the spacecraft’s scheduled landing on the moon. Before that, the Lunar Orbit decline seemed to be going well.
CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada apologizes to everyone who contributed to the mission, which is ISPACE’s second moon strikeout.
The company’s first lunar rover also ended in a crash two years ago, giving its successor Lander the name “resilient”.
“This is the second time we can’t land. So we really have to take it very seriously,” Hakamada told reporters, stressing that the company will continue to carry out more lunar missions.
Possible problems with laser systems
Officials said preliminary analysis showed that the laser system measuring altitude could not work as planned and the lander was slowing down too quickly.
“Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander may have made a arduous landing on the moon’s surface,” the company said in a written statement.
The Moon has long been a government province and became a target for private clothing in 2019, with more losers than wins in the process.
The long marching journey from Florida last month launched from Florida and resiliently entered the lunar orbit. It shared SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which the ghost arrived at the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.
A few days later, another American intuitive machine arrived at the moon. But the tall, spicy lander faces implantation on a crater near the South Pole of the Moon and was declared dead within hours.
Resilience is targeted at the top of the moon, which is a less dangerous place than the bottom of the shadow. The ISPACE team chose a flat area, a long and narrow area in the Mare Frigoris or the cold ocean, a narrow and narrow area filled with craters and ancient lava flows that spread across the north to the north.
Engineers “do everything possible”
Plans require 2.3 meters of elasticity within a few hours to lower landers to the moon’s surface this weekend.
The rover built by Ispace’s Europe (called Tenacious) is made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic and is equipped with a HD camera to reconnaise the area and shovel up the shovel to scree NASA’s lunar dirt.
The rover weighs only five kilograms and it will be close to the lander, circled in less than a few centimeters per second. It has the ability to venture one kilometer away from Randall.
A few minutes before trying to land, Hakamada assured everyone that Ispace learned from its first failed mission. “The engineers did everything they could” to ensure this success.
He believes that by 2027, NASA will participate in 2027, and its latest moon is “just a stepping stone.”
Jeremy Fix, chief engineer of the company’s U.S. subsidiary, said at a meeting last month that like other businesses, Ispace has no “unlimited funds” with others and cannot afford duplicate failures.
Company officials said that while the cost of this latest task was not leaked, it was less than the first to surpass the first official in the United States.
Before the end of the year, two other U.S. companies are targeting the moon: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and astronomy technology. The first moon of astronomy, Lunar Lander, completely missed the moon in 2024 and crashed in the Earth’s atmosphere.
For decades, government competition has reached the moon. Only five countries have achieved successful robotic lunar landing sites: Russia, the United States, China, India and Japan. Of these, only the United States brought people to the moon: 12 NASA astronauts from 1969 to 1972.
NASA is expected to send four astronauts on the moon next year. After a year or more, the crew landed on the first lunar month in more than half a century, SpaceX’s starship stretched from lunar orbit to the ground. By 2030, China has also formulated a lunar landing plan for its astronauts.
