Tech Japan's Ispace Resilience lander crashed again on moon

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.

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