Lander private lunar of Japan crashes on the moon in a failed mission: NPR

A private lunar of Japan crashed while trying a touch on Friday, the last victim of the commercial rush on the moon.

The company based in Tokyo, Ispace, declared the mission a failure several hours after the loss of communication with the Lander. The flight controllers rushed to contact, but only met with silence and said they concluded the mission.

Communications have stopped less than two minutes before the planned landing on the moon with a mini rover. Until then, the descent of the lunar orbit seemed to be going well.

The CEO and founder, Takeshi Hakamada, apologized to all those who contributed to the mission, the second lunar withdrawal for Ispace.

Two years ago, the first moonshot of the company ended with an landing, giving birth to the name of “resilience” for his successor Lander. Resilience wore a rover with a shovel to collect the lunar dirt and the red house the size of a Swedish artist for placement on the dusty surface of the moon.

The company officials said it was too early to find out if the same problem condemned the two missions.

“This is the second time that we could not land. So we really have to take it very seriously,” Hakamada told journalists. He stressed that the company would continue with more lunar missions.

A preliminary analysis indicates that the laser system to measure the altitude did not work as expected and the landing has descended too quickly, officials said. “Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the Lander has probably made a hard landing on the lunar surface,” the company said in a statement.

Long in the province of governments, the moon became the target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than victories along the way.

Launched in January in Florida during a long trip from Rond-Point, resilience entered the lunar orbit last month. He shared a SpaceX stroll with Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace, who reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to land successfully in March.

Another American company, intuitive machines, arrived at the Moon a few days after Firefly. But the large and hail planted in a crater near the southern pole of the moon and was declared dead in a few hours.

Resilience was targeting the top of the moon, a place less treacherous than the dark background. The ISPACE team has chosen a flat area with few rocks in the fridge or the sea of ​​cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and old lava flows which extends through the northern level on the near side.

The plans had requested 7.5 feet resilience to pass the images back in a few hours and that the landing has lowered the reverse rover on the lunar surface this weekend.

Made of reinforced carbon fiber plastic with four wheels, the European ISPACE rover – named Tenace – sported a high definition camera to locate the area and a shovel to collect lunar dirt for NASA.

The rover, weighing only 11 pounds, was going to stay close to the landing, going in circles at a speed of less than an inch (a few centimeters) per second. He was able to venture to two thirds of a mile from the landing and should be operational throughout the mission of two weeks, the period of daylight.

In addition to scientific and technological experiences, there was an artistic touch.

The rover held a tiny red chalet of Swedish style with a white garnish and a green door, nicknamed the moon house by the creator Mikael Genberg, for the placement on the lunar surface.

A few minutes before the landing attempt, Hakamada assured all those that Ispace had learned from his first failed mission. “The engineers have done everything they could” to ensure success this time, he said.

He considered the last moonshot “simply a waterproof” to his greatest the most of the year launched by 2027 with the participation of NASA.

ISPACE, like other companies, has no “infinite funds” and cannot afford repeated failures, Jeremy Fix, chief engineer of the American subsidiary of Ispace, said at a conference last month.

Although it does not disclose the cost of the current mission, the company officials said it was less than the first one that exceeded $ 100 million.

Two other American companies are targeting moon landings by the end of the year: the blue origin of Jeff Bezos and astroobotic technology. Astrobotic’s first lunar lander completely missed the moon in 2024 and returned to the atmosphere of the earth.

For decades, governments have contributed to go to the moon. Only five countries have managed a successful robotic lunar landing: Russia, the United States, China, India and Japan. Among these, only the United States landed people on the Moon: 12 NASA astronauts from 1969 to 1972.

NASA plans to send four astronauts around the moon next year. This would be followed a year or more later by the first lunar landing by a crew in more than half a century, with the spacecraft providing the lunar orbit elevator to the surface. China also has landing plans on the moon for its own astronauts by 2030.