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WASHINGTON — Resilience, the second mission by Japanese company ispace, likely crashed attempting a landing on the moon June 5.
Resilience was scheduled to land at 3:17 p.m. Eastern at Mare Frigoris, a region at about 60 degrees north latitude on the near side of the moon. Once on the surface, the lander was designed to operate for a lunar day, or about two weeks, until sunset causes the solar-powered lander to shut down.
While ispace said the initial phases of the landing attempt went as planned, telemetry displayed on the company’s webcast indicated that the lander reached the surface about one minute and 45 seconds before the scheduled landing time, with a reported speed of 187 kilometers per hour, far too fast for a safe landing. Telemetry was then lost, or no longer displayed, and the company ended the webcast about 25 minutes later with no updates on the lander’s status.
In a statement issued about five hours after the scheduled landing, the company acknowledged that Resilience was likely lost. “The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing,” ispace stated.
“Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface,” the company concluded. It added there had been no contact with the lander after the scheduled landing time.
“Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause,” Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, said in the statement.
The company released the statement at the same time as Hakamada and other ispace executives held a press conference on Tokyo. They provided few additional technical details about the failed landing, stating that they needed to do more analysis to identify the root cause. They declined to speculate on those potential root causes.
They added, though, that the problem appeared to be different from the company’s first lander, similar in design to Resilience, which crashed in an April 2023 landing. The company attributed that failure to a software problem that caused the spacecraft to believe it was on the surface when it was still at an altitude of five kilometers.
“There are different phenomena that we are observing, so we have to look at the root cause in more detail,” said Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, at the briefing. He noted later in the briefing that the laser rangefinder on Resilience was of a different design than the one on Mission 1 because the vendor had discontinued the earlier model.
Mission overview
Resilience launched on a Falcon 9 Jan. 15, sharing the launch with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander. While Firefly’s lander made a successful landing on the moon March 2, Resilience followed a low-energy trajectory to reduce propellant requirements, making a lunar flyby Feb. 14 that sent it on a trajectory that took it 1.1 million kilometers from the moon before returning.
Resilience entered orbit around the moon May 6, performing a series of maneuvers in subsequent weeks to place it in a final circular orbit at an altitude of 100 kilometers from which it would make its descent to the lunar surface.
The lander, with a dry mass of 340 kilograms, carried several payloads, such as a water electrolyzer, a food production experiment from Japanese companies and a deep space radiation probe from National Central University in Taiwan. It also included a “commemorative alloy plate” from a branch of Japanese entertainment company Bandai Namco and a memory disk from UNESCO.
The biggest payload was Tenacious, a five-kilogram rover developed by ispace’s European subsidiary. The rover was equipped with cameras and a scoop, which would be used to collect regolith. The company would then transfer ownership of that regolith to NASA under a $5,000 contract awarded in 2020, part of an effort by the agency to establish precedence for rights to space resources.
Tenacious also carried a small model house called The Moonhouse, created by a team led by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg. It is an art project that Genberg, at a briefing June 4, said will help create a new perspective on “what it is to be human, what life is all about.” Tenacious would have deployed The Moonhouse onto the lunar surface and take images of it.
Future missions
More lunar missions are on tap for ispace. The company’s U.S. subsidiary is building a new model of lander, called Apex 1.0, for a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission led by Draper and scheduled for launch in 2027, called Mission 3 by ispace. In Japan, ispace is working on a separate new lander design, called Series 3, for its Mission 4 in 2027 that is supported by an $80 million award from the Japanese government.
Because the landers are a different design from Resilience, ispace executives said it was unclear what impact the crash would have on them. However, they remained committed to flying them.
There are few companies capable of developing lunar landers, noted Jumpei Nozaki, chief financial officer of ispace, at the briefing, but many customers who want to fly their payloads on them, giving ispace a “competitive edge” if can demonstrate a successful landing.
“If we can succeed in these missions,” he said of Mission 3 and 4, “then we can show our ability to our customers.”
“It’s hard to land on the moon, technically,” Hakamada said. “We know it’s not easy. It’s not something that everyone can do.”
He noted, though, the successful lunar landings by American companies as well as the Japanese space agency JAXA. “We know it’s hard, but an important point is that it’s not impossible.”
Those other successes, he suggested, would serve as motivation for ispace to find and correct the problems that led to the failed Resilience landing. “The most important thing is to find out the cause for the second failure,” he said. “We have to use that to make Mission 3 and Mission 4 a success.”
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