2 days ago
Watch Live as Japanese Startup Attempts Moon Landing After Failed First Mission
The Resilience lander has spent the past six months traveling to the Moon, with plans to touch down in its far northern region. Japanese company ispace is aiming for a Thursday landing—its second attempt to reach the lunar surface.
Resilience is set to land on June 5 at 3:24 p.m. ET, aiming for a smooth touchdown near the center of the Mare Frigoris region (which roughly translates to the sea of cold). The landing attempt will be streamed live on ispace's YouTube channel, beginning around one hour before the scheduled touchdown. You can also tune in through the feed below.
Tokyo-based ispace launched its second mission to the Moon on January 15. Resilience hitched a ride along with another lander headed to the Moon. Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost landed on the Moon on March 2, while Resilience took a much longer route. Resilience first operated in an elliptical transfer orbit before using a lunar flyby to move into a low-energy transfer trajectory that will then enable it to attempt a soft landing. The lander has successfully checked off all of its orbital maneuvers and will remain in a low lunar orbit until the big day, according to ispace. For its landing attempt, Resilience will automatically fire its main propulsion system to gradually decelerate and adjust its altitude to begin descent from its current orbit toward the lunar surface.
The Resilience lander is carrying a small rover, named Tenacious, to Mare Frigoris, located in the Moon's far northern regions. It's also packed with science instruments, mainly from commercial space ventures in Japan, designed to explore the lunar surface.
This is ispace's second attempt to land on the Moon, although the first was unsuccessful. In April 2023, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) Lunar Lander plummeted towards the Moon and crashed on its surface. The company later revealed that, during the lander's descent toward the lunar surface, Hakuto-R estimated that it was very close to zero altitude when it was roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the surface. As a result, the lander slowed itself down during its descent, eventually running out of fuel and free-falling onto the Moon. Hakuto-R M1 was carrying both commercial and government-owned payloads, including a tiny, two-wheeled transformable robot from the Japanese space agency.
Members of the Japanese startup are optimistic about their second go at a Moon landing. 'We have leveraged the operational experience gained in Mission 1 and during this current voyage to the Moon, and we are confident in our preparations for success of the lunar landing,' Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, said in a statement.
The Moon has claimed a number of landers in the past few years as more commercial companies attempt to touch down on its rough surface. Texas-based startup Intuitive Machines crashed not one, but two landers, with both Nova-C and Athena ending up lying on their sides.
