Japanese spacecraft that landed on the moon probably crashed
Japanese company ispace lost contact with a spacecraft it planned to send to the moon on Tuesday.
“We have not confirmed communication with the lander,” a company official said about 25 minutes after the planned landing.
“We have to assume that we failed to complete the landing on the lunar surface,” he said.
Only the United States, China and the former Soviet Union have successfully landed spacecraft on the moon. Recent attempts by the Indian and Israeli company SpaceIL ended in failure.
The company’s founder and CEO, Takeshi Hakamada, said the mission lays “the foundation for unlocking the Moon’s potential and transforming it into a robust and vibrant economic system.”
What do we know about the mission?
The Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) spacecraft was scheduled to land at around 1:40 pm Japan Time (1650 UTC/GMT).
The probe lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a Space X rocket in December.
The M1 is 2.3 meters (7.55 feet) tall and was moving at nearly 6,000 kilometers (62 miles) per hour, ispace chief technology officer Ryo Ujiie told a news conference on Monday. .
Before attempting to land, it was in orbit around the moon traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour (3,700 miles per hour).
The M1 was supposed to adjust its speed and altitude to make a “soft landing” on the moon. Ujiie said slowing down the probe was like “slamming on the brakes on a bicycle running at the edge of a ski jumping hill”.
The M1 is carrying several rovers, including the four-wheeled “Rashid” from the UAE.
“What we achieved so far is already a great achievement and we are already applying the lessons learned on this flight in our future missions”, said the CEO of ispace.
“The stage is set. I look forward to witnessing this historic day, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial lunar missions,” said Hakamada.
Other moon landing missions
Ispace is scheduled to work with the American Draper Space Laboratory to bring NASA payloads to the moon starting in 2025. The teams aim to build a permanent lunar colony by 2040.
The company believes the Moon will support a population of 1,000 people by 2040. It says an additional 10,000 people will be able to visit each year.
He has scheduled a second mission for 2024, on which he plans to deploy his own rover.
Tokyo aims to send Japanese astronauts to the Moon by the end of the 2030s.
Last month, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) new medium-sized H3 rocket was forced to self-destruct after reaching space.
In October, JAXA’s solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch.
sdi/jcg (Reuters, AFP, AP)
Source: DW
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