A Japanese company’s spacecraft apparently crashed while attempting to land on the moon Wednesday, losing contact moments before touchdown and sending flight controllers scrambling to figure out what happened.
More than six hours after communication ceased, the Tokyo company in space finally confirmed what everyone had suspected, saying there was “a high probability” that the lander had slammed into the moon.
founder and CEO of space, held out hope even after contact was lost as the lander descended the final 33 feet (10 meters).
Flight controllers peered at their screens in Tokyo as minutes went by with only silence from the moon.
Official word finally came in a statement: “It has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the moon’s surface.” If all had gone well, space would have been the first private business to pull off a lunar landing. Hakamada vowed to try again, saying a second moonshot is already in the works for next year.
Only three governments have successfully touched down on the moon: Russia, the United States and China. An Israeli nonprofit tried to land on the moon in 2019, but its spacecraft was destroyed on impact.
“If space is hard, landing is harder,” tweeted Laurie Leshin , director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “I know from personal experience how awful this feels.” Leshin worked on NASA’s Mars Polar lander that crashed on the red planet in 1999
Engineers monitoring the fuel gauge noticed that as the tank approached empty, the lander picked up speed as it descended and communication was then lost, according to space. That’s what leads them to believe the lander crashed.
NASA’s first test flight in its new moonshot programme , Artemis, made it to the moon and back late last year, paving the way for four astronauts to follow by the end of next year and two others to actually land on the moon a year after that.
China has successfully landed three spacecraft on the moon since 2013, and U.S., China, India and South Korea have satellites currently circling the moon.
The unmanned Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander had been scheduled to touch down on the Moon’s surface overnight, but about 25 minutes after the landing was to have occurred, the firm could not establish contact.
“It has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the Moon’s surface,” ispace said in a statement.
The company said its engineers were working to establish why the landing had failed.
The lander carried several lunar rovers, including a round, baseball-sized robot jointly developed by Japan’s space agency and toy manufacturer Takara Tomy, the creator of the Transformer toys.
It also had the 10-kilogram (22-pound) chair-sized Rashid rover developed by the United Arab Emirates and an experimental imaging system from Canadensys Aerospace.
With just 200 employees, space has said it “aims to extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world by providing high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the Moon.”
A lunar lander from Japanese company space attempted to become the first craft from a private firm to touch down safely on the surface of the moon – but it lost communications just before landing
