Tech Japan's Ispace Resilience lander crashed again on moon

[thomas]

Japanese space startup Ispace's latest lunar mission concluded unsuccessfully on Friday after the team was unable to establish contact with its lander, suggesting a crash landing likely occurred. The company aimed to become the first non-U.S. private enterprise to land on the lunar surface successfully. The lander, named Resilience, was scheduled to touch down in the early morning hours (Japan Standard Time) near the central region of the Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold) in the Moon's northern hemisphere. This was part of Mission 2 under Ispace's ongoing Hakuto-R programme.

Resilience was carrying a four-wheeled rover built by Ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary, along with five external payloads worth a total of $16 million, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university. The lander had targeted Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900 km (560 miles) from the moon's north pole. If the landing had been successful, the 2.3-metre-high lander and the rover would have begun 14 days of planned exploration activities, including the capture of regolith, the moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with the U.S. space agency NASA. Resilience in January shared a SpaceX rocket launch with Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, which took a faster trajectory to the moon and touched down successfully in March. Intuitive Machines, which last year marked the world's first commercial lunar touchdown, also landed its second Athena lander in March, although in a toppled position, just as with its first mission. Japan last year became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing, after the former Soviet Union, the United States, China, and India, when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency successfully touched down its SLIM lander.

Japanese space startup Ispace fails in second moon-landing mission

The firm had been aiming to become the first private company outside the United States to achieve a soft landing on the moon.

www.japantimes.co.jp

Japan's ispace fails again: Resilience lander crashes on moon

Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, had problems measuring its distance to the surface and could not slow its descent fast enough.

www.reuters.com

Status Update on ispace Mission 2 SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon | ispace

Ispace is a private lunar robotic exploration company that is developing micro-robotic technology to provide a low-cost and frequent transportation service to and on the Moon, conduct lunar surface exploration to map, process and deliver resources to our customers in cislunar space.

ispace-inc.com