() — A Japanese lunar lander, carrying an exploration vehicle developed in the United Arab Emirates, attempted to land on the moon’s surface on Tuesday, marking the first landing by a commercially developed spacecraft. However, flight controllers on the ground were unable to immediately establish contact, leading the company to assume that the aircraft had been lost.
The lander, built by the Japanese company Ispace, launched on December 11 from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket. Since then, the spacecraft has traveled a three-month journey to enter orbit around the Moon, located about 383,000 kilometers from Earth, using a low-energy trajectory. In total, the lander traveled 1.4 million kilometers through space.
The landing was expected to take place this Tuesday at 12:40 p.m. ET, that is, Wednesday at 1:40 a.m. Japan Standard Time.
Minutes passed as the mission control team worked to regain contact with the vehicle after an expected communications outage. About 20 minutes after the scheduled landing time, Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada offered an update.
“We have not been able to confirm the success of the landing,” he said. “We have to assume… that we have not been able to complete the landing on the lunar surface. Our engineers are still investigating the situation.”
Hakamada added that his team was able to collect data from the vehicle up to the landing attempt, a “major achievement” that should help inform future Ispace missions.
The lunar lander, named Hakuto-R, was carrying the Rashid rover, built by the United Arab Emirates’ Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai, the first Arab-made lunar spacecraft.
In history, only three countries have carried out a controlled moon landing: the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China. The United States remains the only country to have landed humans on the Moon.
The Japanese company Ispace took a different approach than previous lunar missions, attempting to land on the moon as a for-profit company and not under the flag of a single country.
The company had shared mission updates on its twitter account, including a recent photograph of Earth peeking out from behind the Moon captured by the spacecraft on its journey through lunar orbit.
We’ve received another incredible photo from the camera onboard our Mission 1 lander!
Seen here is the lunar Earthrise during solar eclipse, captured by the lander-mounted camera at an altitude of about 100 km from the lunar surface. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/pNSI4lPnux
—ispace (@ispace_inc) April 24, 2023
The lunar exploration company had prepared for any setback. “Recognizing the possibility of an anomaly during the mission, the results will be weighed and evaluated against the criteria and incorporated into future missions already under development between now and 2025,” the company wrote in a statement. publication of December 11.
In case of success, the 10-kilogram Rashid rover was expected to exit the lander and spend “most of 14 lunar days exploring Atlas crater, northeast of the Moon.” according to the European Space Agencywho helped design the rover’s wheels.
The “Rashid rover is equipped with a high-resolution camera on its front mast and another mounted on its rear, as well as a microscope camera and a thermal imaging camera,” the ESA said. “It also carries a ‘Langmuir probe’ to sample the plasma environment that prevails just above the lunar surface.”
The context
Japanese company Ispace is one of several companies competing in the Google Lunar XPrize, which offered a $20 million reward to the company that could put a robotic rover on the moon, travel a couple of thousand meters, and transmit data back to Earth.
The Google-sponsored contest was scrapped in 2018, but Ispace was among the companies that chose to continue pursuing the mission.
Israel-based company SpaceIL was the first XPrize contestant to attempt to put its lander on the Moon after the program ended. Its Beresheet spacecraft crashed in 2019 after ground crews lost contact with the lander as it neared the surface.
That same year, the Indian Organization for Space and Research lost contact with a lunar lander shortly before it landed on the Moon. Communication with the spacecraft was never recovered, and images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later revealed the crash site and the mission’s final resting place.
A mission to collect lunar soil samples on behalf of NASA is part of Ispace’s future plans: its Artemis program envisions the use of commercial lunar landers to explore the lunar surface.
