A Japanese company has lost contact with a small robotic spacecraft it was sending to the moon. This is a signal that it may have hit the moon.
The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, built by Japan’s Ice Space, fell out of lunar orbit after igniting its main engine. About an hour later, at 12:40 p.m. Eastern time, the approximately 7.5-foot-tall lander was expected to touch down in Atlas Crater, a 54-mile-wide feature in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the Moon. .
However, no signal was received from the spacecraft after landing. The Tokyo control room fell silent in the live video streamed by the company. Ispace engineers, mostly young and from all over the world, stared at their screens with anxious expressions.
“At this time, we have not been able to confirm a successful lunar landing,” said Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada, 30 minutes after the scheduled landing time.
Therefore, they had to assume that loss of communication meant that they were unable to complete the landing on the moon.
The Ispace lander may have been the first step towards a new paradigm in space exploration by allowing governments, research institutes and businesses to send scientific experiments and other cargo to the moon.
The start of that transition to lunar transportation will have to wait for other companies later this year. It is scheduled to be launched on the moon.
Hakamada said in an interview that he is still “very proud” of the result.
The rover launched in December, followed a circuitous but energy efficient path to the moon, and entered lunar orbit in March. During this past month, engineers have been checking the lander’s systems before attempting to land.
Once the engines fired, the spacecraft would either land or crash today. There was no ability to return to a higher orbit to try again later. And something seems to have gone wrong.
Hakamada said Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer at Ispace, said the rover communicates with the surface of the earth. “But our engineers need to look more closely at what happened around the touchdown,” he said. “Otherwise, nothing can be confirmed.”
He said he wasn’t sure if the data showed something wrong at the last minute.
Using the data obtained from the spacecraft, the company can apply ‘lessons learned’ to the next two missions,” he said.
NASA launched a commercial lunar payload service program in 2018. This is because buying a private spacecraft vehicle for the instruments and equipment to the moon promises to be cheaper than building your own vehicle. Additionally, NASA hopes to spur new commercial industries around the moon, and competition among lunar companies could further drive costs down. This program was modeled in part on a similar effort that successfully provided transportation to and from the International Space Station.
But so far NASA has shown little indication of its efforts. His first two missions at the end of the year, with Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology and Houston’s Intuitive Machines, are years behind schedule and some of the companies NASA has selected to bid for his CLPS mission. has already gone out of business.
Ispace is planning a second mission next year using a nearly identical lander design. In 2026, his larger Ispace lander will carry her NASA payload to the far side of the moon as part of the CLPS mission led by the Draper Research Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Two countries, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, may have lost their payloads onboard their landers. Japan’s space agency, JAXA, wants to test a two-wheeled transformable lunar robot, and Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center has sent a small rover to explore the landing site. Each was their country’s first robotic rover on the moon.
Other payloads included an all-solid-state battery test module from NGK Spark Plug Company, an artificial intelligence flight computer, and a 360-degree camera from Canadensys Aerospace.
In the space race more than 50 years ago, both the United States and the Soviet Union successfully sent unmanned spacecraft to the moon. Most recently, China landed an intact spacecraft on the Moon three times.
However, other attempts have failed.
Beresheet, an initiative of Israeli non-profit SpaceIL, crashed in April 2019 when a command sent to the spacecraft accidentally turned off its main engine, causing the spacecraft to plummet and be destroyed.
Eight months later, India’s Vikram lander went off course about a mile above the surface during a landing attempt and then went silent.
If the Ispace lander crashed, it may take some time to figure out what happened from the telemetry returned from the spacecraft. and may even find M1’s resting place in the Atlas Crater.
Ispace isn’t the only private space company to face difficulties in the first few months of 2023. Virgin Orbit’s latest rocket launch failed and the company later declared bankruptcy but continues to work on another launch.
At the same time, launch frequency is at an all-time high, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket making dozens of successful takeoffs so far in 2023. The Arianespace rocket also sent a European Space Agency probe on a mission to Jupiter.
