Latest news with #Hakuto-R
India Today
2 days ago
- Science
- India Today
Japan's Moon landing dream crashes, again
Japan's space programme faces a second fatal loss in two years as ispace's Resilience spacecraft crashed on the Moon during its highly-anticipated landing attempt on Friday, June 6, 2025. The spacecraft was targeting to land on the Moon's Sea of Cold in the Northern Hemisphere when Mission Control in Tokyo lost communications and telemetry with the spacecraft. ispace stated that the lander successfully began its descent phase from an altitude of 100 kilometres and all was well until the 20 kilometres mark above the Moon. The spacecraft successfully fired its engine at 20 kilometres altitude to begin deceleration. The engineers later confirmed that 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 and suffered a hard landing. In 2023, the company's first spacecraft, Hakuto-R, crashed with the Rashid rover. The spacecraft experienced an unexpected acceleration on its way down to the surface.
See - Sada Elbalad
2 days ago
- Business
- See - Sada Elbalad
Japan's Resilience Lunar Mission Failed
Rana Atef On Thursday, Japan's private space company, Ispace, announced that its anticipated Resilience lunar mission failed. Reports highlighted that the lunar lander likely crashed into the moon. 'This is our second failure, and about these results, we have to really take it seriously,' Ispace's CEO Takeshi Hakamada said. The company's said that data sent back from the spacecraft to mission control before landing was different from the issue behind the 2023 lunar mission failure. 'The data that we've been looking at — it wasn't exactly the same as we have seen from the first mission,' said Ispace's Chief Technology Officer Ryo Ujiie. The Hakuto-R spacecraft crash-landed during that trip after a software error caused the device to miscalculate its altitude. read more UAE's Lunar Mission Delayed to Tomorrow Twitter Lifts Trump's Account Ban Scientists Find Evidence Of 10،000 Black Holes Surrounding The Center Of The Milky Way Galaxy Greenhouse In Antarctica Able To Grow Vegetables Without Soil Or Sunlight Moving Over China: U.S. Is Again Home to World's Speediest Supercomputer Technology The 10 most expensive cars in the world Technology Top 10 fastest cars in the world Technology Lasers Could Make Computers 1 Million Times Faster Technology Smart technology taking control of our lives News China Launches Largest Ever Aircraft Carrier Sports Former Al Zamalek Player Ibrahim Shika Passes away after Long Battle with Cancer Lifestyle Get to Know 2025 Eid Al Adha Prayer Times in Egypt Sports Neymar Announced for Brazil's Preliminary List for 2026 FIFA World Cup Qualifiers News Prime Minister Moustafa Madbouly Inaugurates Two Indian Companies Arts & Culture New Archaeological Discovery from 26th Dynasty Uncovered in Karnak Temple Business Fear & Greed Index Plummets to Lowest Level Ever Recorded amid Global Trade War Arts & Culture Zahi Hawass: Claims of Columns Beneath the Pyramid of Khafre Are Lies News Flights suspended at Port Sudan Airport after Drone Attacks News Shell Unveils Cost-Cutting, LNG Growth Plan
India Today
3 days ago
- Science
- India Today
Japan's Resilience lander crashes on the Moon: Here's what went wrong
Japan's private company ispace had a second fatal loss on the Moon in two years as its second lunar lander dubbed Resilience spacecraft was tagetting to land on the Moon's Sea of Cold in the Northern Hemisphere when Mission Control in Tokyo lost communications and telemetry with the later confirmed that the mission was lost. "Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyse the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause,' said Takeshi Hakamada, Founder and CEO of WHAT WENT WRONG ON THE MOON? Hours after the spacecraft crashed on the Moon, ispace revealed the initial findings from data it received moments before the spacecraft had a hard landing on the stated that the lander successfully began its descent phase from an altitude of 100 kilometres and all was well until 20 kilometres marks above the Moon. The spacecraft successfully fired its engine at 20 kilometres altitude to begin deceleration."While the lander's attitude 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 engineers later confirmed that 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 and suffered a hard landing. Resilience spacecraft flying above the Moon. (Photo: ispace) advertisementResilience, launched in January 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, spent nearly five months travelling to the Moon using a fuel-efficient low-energy transfer trajectory—a route that, while slower, allowed for careful system checks and adjustments along the spacecraft entered lunar orbit in May and targeted a landing at Mare Frigoris, the 'Sea of Cold,' a vast basaltic plain in the Moon's Northern Hemisphere chosen for its smooth terrain and extended landing was scheduled for 12:47 am IST, with global audiences tuning in to ispace's live broadcast in hopes of witnessing a historic fatal end brings back the sore memories of 2023, when the company's first spacecraft Hakuto-R, crashed with the Rashid rover. The spacecraft experienced an unexpected acceleration on its way down to the surface.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Private Japanese spacecraft crashes into moon in 'hard landing,' ispace says
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A spacecraft from Japan attempting to make the country's first private moon landing on Thursday instead crashed into the lunar surface in a disappointing second failure for its ispace builders. The Japanese company's Resilience spacecraft aimed to make a soft touchdown in the Mare Frigoris ("Sea of Cold") region of the moon's near side today (June 5) at 3:17 p.m. EDT (1917 GMT; 4:17 a.m. on June 6 Japan Standard Time). But telemetry from the lander stopped one minute and 45 seconds before the scheduled touchdown, apparently due to an equipment malfunction. It was reminiscent of ispace's first lunar landing attempt, in April 2023. The spacecraft also went dark during that try, which was eventually declared a failure. "We wanted to make Mission 2 a success but unfortunately we were able to land," ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada told reporters in a press conference a few hours after the landing try. Preliminary data based on telemetry from Resilience's final moments suggest that the lander's laser rangefinder experienced some sort of delays while measuring the probe's distance to the lunar surface. "As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing," ispace officials wrote in an update. "Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface." A hard landing means Resilience hit the moon's surface faster than planned. It's unlikely it survived in any condition to proceed with its two-week mission, or deploy the small Tenacious rover built by the European Space Agency. "For those who have supported us, we'd really like to apologize," Hakamada said, adding that ispace is committed to learning from its failures for future flights. "We have to continue on our mission to have moon exploration by [the] Japanese." Resilience stood 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and weighs about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) when fully fueled. It's the second of ispace's Hakuto-R lunar landers, which explains the name of its current flight: Hakuto-R Mission 2. Hakuto is a white rabbit in Japanese mythology. The ispace folks first used the name for their entry in the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million to the first private team to soft-land a probe on the moon and have it accomplish some basic exploration tasks. The Prize ended in 2018 without a winner, but ispace carried on with its lunar hardware and ambitions. (The "R" in Hakuto-R stands for "reboot.") The company made big strides on Hakuto-R Mission 1, which successfully reached lunar orbit in March 2023. But that spacecraft couldn't stick the landing; it crashed after its altitude sensor got confused by the rim of a lunar crater, which it mistook for the surrounding lunar surface. ispace folded the lessons learned into Hakuto-R Mission 2, which launched on Jan. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast. That was a moon-mission twofer for SpaceX: Resilience shared the rocket with Blue Ghost, a robotic lander built and operated by the Texas company Firefly Aerospace that carried 10 scientific instruments for NASA via the agency's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Blue Ghost arrived in orbit around the moon on Feb. 13 and landed successfully on March 2, pulling off the second-ever soft lunar touchdown by a private spacecraft. That mission went well from start to finish; the solar-powered Blue Ghost operated on the moon for two weeks as planned, finally going dark on March 16 after the sun set over its landing site. Resilience took a longer, more energy-efficient path to the moon, which featured a close flyby of Earth's nearest neighbor on Feb. 14. The lander arrived in lunar orbit as planned on May 6, then performed a series of maneuvers to shift into a circular path just 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the surface. That set the stage for Thursday's action. Resilience used a series of thruster burns to descend, decelerate and steer its way toward a landing in Mare Frigoris, a vast basaltic plain that lies about 56 degrees north of the lunar equator. But something went wrong when Resilience was just 192 meters above the lunar surface. It's not clear if Resilience was moving faster than expected because of the laser rangefinder data lag, or if that data lag was caused by the probe moving faster than planned, ispace said. "First, we have to figure out the root cause for the phenomenon we observed, and then we have to utilize them into Mission 3 and Mission 4," Hakamada said. If Resilience had succeeded today, it would be just the second soft lunar touchdown for Japan; its national space agency, JAXA, put the SLIM ("Smart Lander for Investigating Moon') spacecraft down safely in January 2024. Today's landing attempt was part of a wave of private lunar exploration, which kicked off with Israel's Beresheet lander mission in 2019. Beresheet failed during its touchdown try, just as ispace's first mission did two years ago. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic had an abortive go in January 2024 with its Peregrine lunar lander, which suffered a crippling fuel leak shortly after launch and ended up crashing back to Earth. A month later, Houston company Intuitive Machines made history with its Odysseus craft, which touched down near the lunar south pole. Odysseus tipped over shortly after touchdown but continued operating for about a week. Its successor, named Athena, also toppled during its lunar touchdown on March 6 — just four days after Blue Ghost hit the gray dirt — with more serious consequences: The probe went dark within a few short hours. Peregrine, Blue Ghost, Odysseus and Athena all carried NASA science payloads. They were supported by the agency's CLPS program, which aims to gather cost-efficient science data ahead of crewed Artemis moon landings, the first of which is slated for 2027. Resilience carried five payloads, but they don't belong to NASA; Hakuto-R Mission 2 is not a CLPS effort. Three of these five are pieces of science gear that aim to help human exploration of the moon: a deep-space radiation probe developed by National Central University in Taiwan; a technology demonstration from the Japanese company Takasago Thermal Engineering Co. designed to produce hydrogen and oxygen from moon water; and an algae-growing experiment provided by Malaysia-based Euglena Co. (Algae could be an efficient food source for lunar settlers someday.) The other two payloads are a commemorative plate based on the "Charter of the Universal Century" from the Japanese sci-fi franchise Gundam and a tiny rover named Tenacious, which was built by ispace's Luxembourg-based subsidiary. Tenacious was designed to roll down onto the surface and collect a small amount of moon dirt, under a contract that ispace signed with NASA back in 2020. The rover carried a payload of its own — "Moonhouse," a tiny replica of a red-and-white Swedish house designed by artist Mikael Gensberg. The rover was supposed to lower the Moonhouse off its front bumper onto the lunar dirt, establishing a colorful artistic homestead in the stark gray landscape. None of that will come to pass, however, now that ispace has confirmed Resilience slammed into the lunar surfance instead of making a delicate four-point "soft landing." Related stories: — What's flying to the moon on ispace's Resilience lunar lander? — Japan's Resilience moon lander aces lunar flyby ahead of historic touchdown try (photo) — Japan's Resilience moon lander arrives in lunar orbit ahead of June 5 touchdown Despite the failed Resilience landing, ispace has big lunar goals. The company plans to launch two moon missions in 2027, Mission 3 and Mission 4, that will use a larger, more capable lander named Apex 1.0. That lander will weigh 2 tons, much larger than Resilience. "We know it's not going to be easy," ispace director and CFO Jumpei Nozaki said during the press conference. "But it's hard. It has some meaning and significance of trying." Nozaki said he and ispace felt extremely sorry to have disappointed the company's 80,000 supporters and stockholders, and were determined to learn from the experimence in the designs fo Mission 3 and Mission 4. Hakamada, when asked by a reporter if he or the team had cried after the failed landing, said it wasn't a time for crying. "Right now, we don't know the cause, so I can't get emotional and cry," he said. "I don't think that's a good idea. The most important thing is to find out the cause for this second failure." Editor's note: This story, originally posted at 5 p.m. ET, was updated at 9:30 p.m ET with new details from ispace's post landing attempt press conference. Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik contributed to this report.
Indian Express
3 days ago
- Science
- Indian Express
Why Japanese Moon mission's failure during landing marks yet another setback for private operators
A Japanese space mission that was supposed to land on the Moon this morning (June 6) has ended in failure, with the spacecraft likely meeting a fate similar to that Chandrayaan-2 – unable to decelerate sufficiently in the final moments and crashing on the Moon's surface. 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.
