Japanese spacecraft crashes during moon-landing
Samantha Donovan: Over the years, many attempts to land a spacecraft on the moon have failed. Japanese company, iSpace, tried to land an uncrewed vessel on the moon two years ago, but it crashed during the landing. Now it appears the company's second attempt has ended the same way. Elizabeth Cramsie has more.
Elizabeth Cramsie: If at first you don't succeed, try and try again. It's a useful motto, but for the second time now, Japanese company, iSpace, has failed to land on the moon.
Takeshi Hakamada: In conclusion, we have not achieved the landing. So in that regards, you can say we failed.
Elizabeth Cramsie: That's Takeshi Hakamada, the CEO and founder of iSpace. Two years ago, iSpace's first attempt ended in failure when its spacecraft crashed into the surface of the moon. This second uncrewed lander was aptly named Resilience. But in a media conference today, Mr Hakamada once again had to apologise to everyone who contributed to the mission.
Takeshi Hakamada: This is the second time that we were not able to land. So we really have to take it very seriously.
Elizabeth Cramsie: The suspense had been building as the lander approached the moon and prepared to land. Up until that point, the mission had gone well, but communications were lost less than two minutes before the scheduled landing. Ryo Ujiie is the Chief Technology Officer.
Ryo Ujiie: Based on the fact that the speed of the lander was not reduced enough, I think it's appropriate to think it is crashed.
Elizabeth Cramsie: Associate Professor Alice Gorman is from Flinders University in Adelaide.
Alice Gorman: I'm very sorry that they weren't successful. It would have been an amazing mission. But what we have to keep in mind, I think, is that in some ways failure is more common than success on the moon.
Elizabeth Cramsie: She says while moon landings have been achieved before, they haven't gotten any less difficult.
Alice Gorman: People remember the successes like the Apollo missions. They don't remember the failures. And with the Apollo missions, I think we were extremely fortunate. So the President of the United States had speeches prepared if the astronauts all died. That was the real possibility. And they didn't, and that's extremely fortunate. But then there was a period after Apollo of about 50 years where people just weren't sending missions to the moon. So a lot of that continuity of knowledge was lost.
Elizabeth Cramsie: She says there's multiple challenges in a moon landing and it's more difficult than other planets.
Alice Gorman: There's no atmosphere. But what that means is that a spacecraft can't use parachutes to slow its speed down when it's coming out of orbit. It has to rely on engines. In the case of the iSpace lander, the information it was getting about its distance from the surface wasn't happening fast enough. So it's kind of out of sync with the little rocket thrusters. So it just went, poof, down it went. There's no air to slow it down.
Elizabeth Cramsie: Professor Gorman says every crash is a learning opportunity.
Alice Gorman: You learn something about your systems, your engineering. You learn something about the lunar surface, the lunar atmosphere. So it's not entirely useless. It's just not what people were hoping for.
Samantha Donovan: That's Associate Professor Alice Gorman from Flinders University, Elizabeth Cramsie, reporting.
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The Advertiser
a day ago
- The Advertiser
Japanese company's moon lander 'likely to have crashed'
Japanese company ispace says its uncrewed moon lander has likely crashed onto the moon's surface during its lunar touchdown attempt, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has not been able to communicate with the spacecraft after a likely hard landing, ispace said in a statement on Friday. The company's livestream of the attempted landing showed Resilience's flight data was lost less than two minutes before the planned touchdown time earlier on Friday. The lander had targeted Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900km from the moon's north pole, and was on an hour-long descent from lunar orbit. A room of more than 500 ispace employees, shareholders, sponsors and government officials abruptly grew silent during a public viewing event at mission partner Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp in the wee hours in Tokyo. In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the moon's surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said. Resilience was carrying a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary and five external payloads, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university. If the landing had been successful, the 2.3m-high lander and the microwave-sized rover would have begun 14 days of planned exploration activities, including capturing images of regolith, the moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with US space agency NASA. Japan in 2024 became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the United States, China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, although in a toppled position. Japanese company ispace says its uncrewed moon lander has likely crashed onto the moon's surface during its lunar touchdown attempt, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has not been able to communicate with the spacecraft after a likely hard landing, ispace said in a statement on Friday. The company's livestream of the attempted landing showed Resilience's flight data was lost less than two minutes before the planned touchdown time earlier on Friday. The lander had targeted Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900km from the moon's north pole, and was on an hour-long descent from lunar orbit. A room of more than 500 ispace employees, shareholders, sponsors and government officials abruptly grew silent during a public viewing event at mission partner Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp in the wee hours in Tokyo. In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the moon's surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said. Resilience was carrying a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary and five external payloads, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university. If the landing had been successful, the 2.3m-high lander and the microwave-sized rover would have begun 14 days of planned exploration activities, including capturing images of regolith, the moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with US space agency NASA. Japan in 2024 became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the United States, China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, although in a toppled position. Japanese company ispace says its uncrewed moon lander has likely crashed onto the moon's surface during its lunar touchdown attempt, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has not been able to communicate with the spacecraft after a likely hard landing, ispace said in a statement on Friday. The company's livestream of the attempted landing showed Resilience's flight data was lost less than two minutes before the planned touchdown time earlier on Friday. The lander had targeted Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900km from the moon's north pole, and was on an hour-long descent from lunar orbit. A room of more than 500 ispace employees, shareholders, sponsors and government officials abruptly grew silent during a public viewing event at mission partner Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp in the wee hours in Tokyo. In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the moon's surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said. Resilience was carrying a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary and five external payloads, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university. If the landing had been successful, the 2.3m-high lander and the microwave-sized rover would have begun 14 days of planned exploration activities, including capturing images of regolith, the moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with US space agency NASA. Japan in 2024 became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the United States, China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, although in a toppled position. Japanese company ispace says its uncrewed moon lander has likely crashed onto the moon's surface during its lunar touchdown attempt, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace's second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has not been able to communicate with the spacecraft after a likely hard landing, ispace said in a statement on Friday. The company's livestream of the attempted landing showed Resilience's flight data was lost less than two minutes before the planned touchdown time earlier on Friday. The lander had targeted Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900km from the moon's north pole, and was on an hour-long descent from lunar orbit. A room of more than 500 ispace employees, shareholders, sponsors and government officials abruptly grew silent during a public viewing event at mission partner Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp in the wee hours in Tokyo. In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the moon's surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said. Resilience was carrying a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary and five external payloads, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university. If the landing had been successful, the 2.3m-high lander and the microwave-sized rover would have begun 14 days of planned exploration activities, including capturing images of regolith, the moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with US space agency NASA. Japan in 2024 became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the United States, China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, although in a toppled position.
ABC News
a day ago
- ABC News
Japanese spacecraft crashes during moon-landing
Samantha Donovan: Over the years, many attempts to land a spacecraft on the moon have failed. Japanese company, iSpace, tried to land an uncrewed vessel on the moon two years ago, but it crashed during the landing. Now it appears the company's second attempt has ended the same way. Elizabeth Cramsie has more. Elizabeth Cramsie: If at first you don't succeed, try and try again. It's a useful motto, but for the second time now, Japanese company, iSpace, has failed to land on the moon. Takeshi Hakamada: In conclusion, we have not achieved the landing. So in that regards, you can say we failed. Elizabeth Cramsie: That's Takeshi Hakamada, the CEO and founder of iSpace. Two years ago, iSpace's first attempt ended in failure when its spacecraft crashed into the surface of the moon. This second uncrewed lander was aptly named Resilience. But in a media conference today, Mr Hakamada once again had to apologise to everyone who contributed to the mission. Takeshi Hakamada: This is the second time that we were not able to land. So we really have to take it very seriously. Elizabeth Cramsie: The suspense had been building as the lander approached the moon and prepared to land. Up until that point, the mission had gone well, but communications were lost less than two minutes before the scheduled landing. Ryo Ujiie is the Chief Technology Officer. Ryo Ujiie: Based on the fact that the speed of the lander was not reduced enough, I think it's appropriate to think it is crashed. Elizabeth Cramsie: Associate Professor Alice Gorman is from Flinders University in Adelaide. Alice Gorman: I'm very sorry that they weren't successful. It would have been an amazing mission. But what we have to keep in mind, I think, is that in some ways failure is more common than success on the moon. Elizabeth Cramsie: She says while moon landings have been achieved before, they haven't gotten any less difficult. Alice Gorman: People remember the successes like the Apollo missions. They don't remember the failures. And with the Apollo missions, I think we were extremely fortunate. So the President of the United States had speeches prepared if the astronauts all died. That was the real possibility. And they didn't, and that's extremely fortunate. But then there was a period after Apollo of about 50 years where people just weren't sending missions to the moon. So a lot of that continuity of knowledge was lost. Elizabeth Cramsie: She says there's multiple challenges in a moon landing and it's more difficult than other planets. Alice Gorman: There's no atmosphere. But what that means is that a spacecraft can't use parachutes to slow its speed down when it's coming out of orbit. It has to rely on engines. In the case of the iSpace lander, the information it was getting about its distance from the surface wasn't happening fast enough. So it's kind of out of sync with the little rocket thrusters. So it just went, poof, down it went. There's no air to slow it down. Elizabeth Cramsie: Professor Gorman says every crash is a learning opportunity. Alice Gorman: You learn something about your systems, your engineering. You learn something about the lunar surface, the lunar atmosphere. So it's not entirely useless. It's just not what people were hoping for. Samantha Donovan: That's Associate Professor Alice Gorman from Flinders University, Elizabeth Cramsie, reporting.
News.com.au
a day ago
- News.com.au
Japanese company aborts Moon mission after assumed crash-landing
Japan's hopes of achieving its first soft touchdown on the Moon by a private company were dashed Friday when the mission was aborted after an assumed crash-landing, the startup said. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to make history as only the third private firm -- and the first outside the United States -- to achieve a controlled arrival on the lunar surface. But "based on the currently available data... it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing", the startup said. "It is unlikely that communication with the lander will be restored" so "it has been decided to conclude the mission", ispace said in a statement. The failure comes two years after a prior mission ended in a crash. The company's unmanned Resilience spacecraft began its daunting final descent and "successfully fired its main engine as planned to begin deceleration", ispace said Friday. Mission control confirmed that the lander's positioning was "nearly vertical" -- but contact was then lost, with the mood on a livestream from mission control turning sombre. Technical problems meant "the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing", ispace said. - High-profile payloads - To date, only five nations have achieved soft lunar landings: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India, and most recently Japan. Now, private companies are joining the race, promising cheaper and more frequent access to space. On board the Resilience lander were several high-profile payloads. They included Tenacious, a Luxembourg-built micro rover; a water electrolyser to split molecules into hydrogen and oxygen; a food production experiment; and a deep-space radiation probe. The rover also carried "Moonhouse" -- a small model home designed by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg. "I take the fact that the second attempt failed to land seriously," CEO Takeshi Hakamada told reporters. "But the most important thing is to use this result" for future missions, he said, describing a "strong will to move on, although we have to carefully analyse what happened". Last year, Houston-based Intuitive Machines became the first private enterprise to reach the Moon. Though its uncrewed lander touched down at an awkward angle, it still managed to complete tests and transmit photos. Then in March this year, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost -- launched on the same SpaceX rocket as ispace's Resilience -- aced its lunar landing attempt. - Never quit - The mood ahead of Friday's attempt had been celebratory, with a watch party also held by iSpace's US branch in Washington. After contact was lost, announcers on an ispace livestream signed off with the message: "Never quit the lunar quest." The mission had also aimed to collect two lunar soil samples and sell them to NASA for $5,000. Though the samples would remain on the Moon, the symbolic transaction is meant to strengthen the US stance that commercial activity -- though not sovereign claims -- should be allowed on celestial bodies. Landing on the Moon is highly challenging as spacecraft must rely on precisely controlled thruster burning to slow their descent over treacherous terrain. Intuitive Machines' second attempt at a Moon landing ended in disappointment in late March. Its spacecraft Athena, designed to touch down on a spot called the Mons Mouton plateau -- closer to the lunar south pole than any previous mission -- tipped over and was unable to recharge its solar-powered batteries. ia-kh-kaf/hmn
