Why Japanese Moon mission's failure during landing marks yet another setback for private operators
The Hakuto-R mission, carried out by the private Japanese company ispace, had a lander called Resilience and a rover called Micro. Just ahead of touchdown this morning, communications with the spacecraft were lost.
'The lander descended from an altitude of approximately 100 km to approximately 20 km, and then successfully fired its main engine as planned to begin deceleration. While the lander's altitude was confirmed to be nearly vertical, telemetry was lost thereafter, and no data indicating a successful landing was received, even after the scheduled landing time had passed,' ispace said in a statement.
'Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Centre has been able to confirm the following: the laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface,' it said.
Chandrayaan-2, which was launched in 2019, had met with a similar fate, having been unable to slow down in the final stages due to a malfunction in the thrusters.
This is the second failure for the Hakuto-R mission to land on the Moon. Its previous attempt in 2023 had also been unsuccessful.
The latest failure accentuates the continuing struggle of private space companies to achieve a clean and safe landing on the Moon. In the last two years alone, five missions from private companies — the other four from the United States — have tried to land on the Moon, and only one has been able to do it cleanly.
US-based Firefly Aerospace has been the only one to make a successful soft-landing so far, with its Blue Ghost mission touching down on March 2. Intuitive-Machines, a Houston based company, got its spacecraft to land twice on the Moon, once last year and then again in March this year, but both times the landing was not entirely perfect. Another US company Astrobotic Technologies had attempted to land its Peregrine mission but it faced technical difficulties during the flight, and the mission could not make its way to the Moon.
Earlier, Israel's Beresheet mission, by a company called SpaceIL, had attempted a moon landing in 2019, but ended up crashing in a similar fashion to the latest incident.
The last part of the landing operation, wherein the speeding spacecraft slows down to make a soft-landing, is the most complex part of the Moon missions. This is where most of the accidents have happened. The Luna-25 mission in 2023, which was marking the return of Russia to the Moon, also ended in a failure during the final moments of landing.
In the last five years, a moon landing has been attempted 12 times, by national as well as private space agencies, and only five of these have been able to land in a manner that fulfils the science objectives of the mission. These include Chandrayaan-3 by India, the SLIM mission by Japan, and Chang'e 5 and 6 missions from China.
An increasing number of private space players have been getting ready with their Moon missions, amidst a renewed urgency to explore the Moon with the objective of establishing facilities for long-term stay and research. US space agency NASA, in particular, has been encouraging the private space companies to build capacities and participate in these missions. It has launched a programme called Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) that is aimed at helping private companies to regularly undertake these complex missions. The missions sent by Astrobotic Technologies, Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace were all part of this CLPS programme. Over a dozen space companies have been contracted by NASA for carrying out these kinds of sorties to the Moon.
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