A Japanese corporation seeking to conduct a rare private Moon landing believes its lunar lander is likely to have crashed on the surface. Communication with Hakuto-R was lost just before it was scheduled to land on Tuesday at 16:40 GMT.
Engineers are looking into what happened
The Tokyo-based iSpace had planned that the lander would deploy an exploratory rover as well as a toymaker’s tennis ball-sized robot. The craft was launched in December by a SpaceX rocket and took five months to reach its target.
“We have not confirmed communication with the lander,” iSpace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said about 25 minutes after the planned landing.
“We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” he added.
Despite not expecting to complete the mission, Mr. Hakamada later stated that the organization had “fully accomplished the significance of this mission, having acquired a great deal of data and experience by being able to execute the landing phase”.
A live simulation showed the M1 lander about to touch down after getting as near to the lunar surface as 295 feet (89 meters).
The lander stood just over 2 meters tall and weighed 340 kilograms, making it modest and compact by lunar spacecraft standards. It was due for an hour-long landing maneuver from its orbit, around 100km above the surface and traveling at almost 6,000km/h.
After landing in the Moon’s northern hemisphere, the Hakuto-R would drop two payloads to study the lunar soil, geology, and atmosphere. One of them was created by the same toy firm that created the Transformers, TOMY.
iSpace’s Commercial Lunar Missions and the potential for future ‘Space Exploration’
Only the United States, Russia, and China have succeeded to land a robot on the moon’s surface, all through government-sponsored initiatives. In 2019, Israel’s Beresheet mission became the first private business attempt to land on the Moon. Its spaceship orbited the moon but was destroyed during the landing attempt.
The major goal of the Japanese mission was to investigate the possibility of commercial lunar surface launches. It was the first of what iSpace hopes will be a series of commercial landers over the next four years, each more ambitious than the one before it.
The company’s objective is to provide commercial services for a long-term human presence on the moon’s surface, such as sending up equipment for mining and producing rocket fuel.
A successful landing, according to Dr. Adam Baker, director of Rocket Engineering, a space consultancy firm not involved with the project, would have signaled a “step change” in commercial involvement in space research.
“If it is affordable and can be repeated, it opens up the door for anyone who is prepared to pay the price to land something on the surface of the Moon,” he told the BBC.