Crashed lander looks back at Earth from the moon
Resilience, a lunar lander built and operated by the Japanese company ispace, was part of the Hakuto-R Mission to deploy a "Moonhouse," a tiny colorful art piece, on the moon, while also exploring its surface features using its Tenacious rover.
After launching on Jan. 15 from Florida's Space Coast on Hakuto-R Mission 2, ispace's Resilience lander arrived in lunar orbit on May 6. The lander then deftly shifted its path to an orbit just 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon's surface. On May 27, Resilience took this photo, with a view of Japan being blocked by the clouds on Earth's surface, according to an ispace tweet.
Resilience hovers over the moon in its lunar orbit, aiming for the Mare Frigoris ("Sea of Cold") on the moon's near side, as a landing site.
With Resilience, the Japanese company ispace hoped to be one of the first to land a private spacecraft on the moon. Unfortunately, its first mission, in April 2023, ended in failure as the crashed during its touchdown attempt.
Undeterred, ispace — in collaboration with other agencies like NASA and JAXA — designed and tested Resilience as part of the Hakuto-R Mission 2 (the R stands for "reboot"). Resilience carried five payloads, including a small 11-pound (5 kilograms) rover named Tenacious, which would have been used to collect lunar samples, according to NASA.
Unfortunately, the landing for Resilience, scheduled on June 5, 2025, came to an abrupt halt when telemetry data from the lander stopped coming in right before the soft landing, leaving the world wondering what happened to Resilience. A few hours later, ispace announced that Resilience likely crashed on the moon, bringing an end to the mission.
You can read more about Resilience and ispace's other missions as the company tries to return to the moon.
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Many thought that this mechanism, known as tidal heating, was so powerful that it created a continuous ocean of magma under the surface rather than the smaller, individual magma reservoirs that fuel Earth's volcanoes. The Galileo mission seemed to back that idea up: it detected an electrically conductive layer under Io's crust suggestive of a magma sea. But when Juno flew perilously close to Io on two occasions, getting within 900 miles of the violent surface, it found no trace of a shallow magma ocean. Mura now suspects Io's magma is partitioned into a maze of rocky tunnels, occasionally bubbling up into open rocky maws wherever the tunnels reach the surface. Nobody knows for sure; in typical Juno style, the observations have raised more questions than answers. But at least while scientists ponder possible solutions, they can marvel at Io's unbound ferocity. 'We discovered the largest eruption ever recorded,' Bolton says. 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