A private lunar lander from Japan crashed on Friday when an attempt to make a touchdown, the latest casualties from a commercial rave to the moon.
The Tokyo-based company, Ispace, announced the mission was a failure after a few hours of communication with Lander. The flight controllers scrambled to contact, but only silence and said they were finishing the mission.
Communication stopped less than two minutes before the spacecraft's scheduled landing on the moon with the mini-rover's moon landing. Before that, the Lunar Orbit decline seemed to be going well.
CEO and founder Takeshi Hakamada apologizes to everyone who contributed to the mission, which is ISPACE's second moon strikeout.
The company's first lunar rover ended two years ago when the crash landed, giving its successor Lander the name "resilience". The toughness comes with a shovel that collects moon dirt and a toy-sized red house by Swedish artists to place on the dusty surface of the moon.
Company officials said it was too early to know whether the same problem was doomed to both tasks.
"This is the second time we can't land. So we really have to take it very seriously," Hakamada told reporters, stressing that the company will continue to carry out more lunar missions.
Officials said preliminary analysis showed that the laser system used to measure altitude could not be used as planned and the lander was descent too quickly. "Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander may have made a arduous landing on the moon's surface," the company said in a written statement.
The Moon has long been a government province and became a target for private clothing in 2019, with more losers than wins in the process.
The long marching journey from Florida last month launched from Florida and resiliently entered the lunar orbit. It shared SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which the ghost arrived at the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.
A few days later, another American intuitive machine arrived at the moon. But the tall, spicy lander faces implantation on a crater near the South Pole of the Moon and was declared dead within hours.
Resilience is targeted at the top of the moon, which is a less dangerous place than the bottom of the shadow. The ISPACE team chose a flat area, a long and narrow area in a mare fruit or cold ocean, with a long, narrow area filled with craters and ancient lava flows that extend to the north near the north side.
Plans require 7.5 feet of elasticity in a few hours to lower the piggy's rover to the moon's surface this weekend.
Ispace’s European-built rover is made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic called “Terrible” rover – equipped with a high-definition camera to search the area and scooped NASA’s lunar dirt with a shovel.
The rover weighs just 11 pounds and is about to get close to the lander, circling around at less than 1 inch per second. It has the ability to venture two-thirds of Lander's two-thirds of the miles and should be operated throughout the two-week mission.
In addition to scientific and technical experiments, there is also an artistic style.
The rover holds a small, Swedish-style red hut with white decorations and green doors, called Moonhouse by creator Mikael Genberg, placed on the surface of the moon.
A few minutes before trying to land, Hakamada assured everyone that Ispace learned from its first failed mission. "The engineers do everything they can" to ensure this success.
He believes that by 2027, NASA will participate in 2027, and its latest moon is "just a stepping stone."
Jeremy Fix, chief engineer of ISPACE's U.S. subsidiary, said at a meeting last month that like other companies, Ispace, like other companies, has no "unlimited funds" and cannot afford repeated failures.
While the cost of the current task was not leaked, it was less than the first one that cost more than $100 million, company officials said.
Before the end of the year, two other U.S. companies are targeting the moon: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and astronomy technology. The first moon of astronomy, Lunar Lander, completely missed the moon in 2024 and crashed in the Earth's atmosphere.