The Japanese company Ispace lost contact with the robotic spacecraft it was sending to the moon, and it is possible that the craft crashed on the lunar surface.
After starting the main engine, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 spacecraft, built by the Japanese company Ispace, began its descent. About an hour later, at 12:40. Eastern time, the 7.5-meter craft was supposed to land in the Atlas crater in the northeast quadrant of the visible side of the Moon.
But after the expected landing time, no signal was received from the spacecraft. The name Hakuto refers to the white rabbit that lives on the moon according to Japanese mythology.
“Right now, we cannot confirm a landing on the surface of the moon,” Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said half an hour later during a live video feed from Tokyo.
The spacecraft was launched in December and circled the moon, entering lunar orbit in March. Over the past month, engineers have been testing the lander’s systems before moving on to the next phase of the mission.
Khakamada said communication with the spacecraft was maintained all the way to the surface, and that data from the landing phase would be invaluable for the company’s next two missions. Engineers are still figuring out what could have happened.
Hakuto-R carried the Rashid rover, which was built by the Mohammed bin Rashid Dubai Space Center (MBRSC) in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the first Arab-built lunar spacecraft.
In 2019, two moon landing attempts — one by the Indian space agency and one by the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL — failed. In history, only three countries have carried out a controlled landing on the moon: the United States, Russia and China..
“What we have achieved so far is a great achievement and we will apply the lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” Khakamada said earlier this month.
This year, four rockets from SpaceX, the Japanese space agency, ABL Space Systems and Relativity Space have been lost during flights. Virgin Orbit also lost a rocket and soon went bankrupt.
According to Reuters, New York Times
Source: Kathimerini
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