Japanese Aerospace Firm Poised to Land Spacecraft on the Moon
Update: Sadly, the spacecraft crashed into the Moon on Friday, June 6. Our original story follows below.
A Japanese aerospace firm called Ispace is set to put a spacecraft on the Moon this week. Resilience, the star of Ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 2, has spent nearly six months circumnavigating Earth and the Moon in preparation for its final descent. If all goes well, the spacecraft will touch down on the lunar surface Thursday afternoon.
Resilience was a travel companion to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which successfully touched down on a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille on March 2. Together, the landers launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15. But while Blue Ghost took just a month and a half to reach its target, Ispace wanted Resilience to stop and smell the roses along the way. The lander completed a lunar flyby before leveraging the Moon's gravity to initiate a slow, fuel-efficient path toward lunar orbit, which it entered on May 6.
Now Ispace mission control is triple-checking that its lander is prepared for its final descent. On May 28, Resilience completed a lunar orbital control maneuver that perfected its trajectory, according to the company on Wednesday morning. The adjustment shortened Resilience's projected landing time by seven minutes, placing touchdown at 3:17 p.m. EST on Thursday, June 5. Ispace will live stream the landing globally; you can watch the English version here.
Mare Frigoris is outlined in blue. Credit: NASA
Resilience will land near the center of Mare Frigoris, which translates to "Sea of Cold." While the surface of the Moon can top 120 degrees Celsius (250 degrees Fahrenheit) during the day, this 1,500-kilometer lunar sea lies in the Moon's far north, which receives less solar radiation and stays relatively cool. Mare Frigoris's flat terrain and proximity to the north pole make it an ideal landing spot, especially because Ispace will need to maintain line-of-sight radio communication as Resilience deploys its many payloads.
Among the payloads are a food production experiment from the Japanese biofuel firm Euglena Co., a deep space radiation probe from Taiwan's National Central University, and Ispace's own Tenacious micro rover, which will independently explore the landing site. Resilience will also place Moonhouse, a sculpture by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, on the lunar surface.
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