Latest news with #MareFrigoris
The Independent
4 days ago
- Science
- The Independent
Japanese company's lunar landing fails in commercial rush to moon
Ispace, a Tokyo -based company, declared its private lunar lander mission a failure after losing communication with the lander during its attempted touchdown on the moon. Communication ceased less than two minutes before the scheduled landing, and a preliminary analysis suggests the laser system for measuring altitude malfunctioned, causing the lander to descend too fast. CEO Takeshi Hakamada apologised for the failed mission, which carried a rover with a shovel for lunar dirt collection and a Swedish artist's toy-size red house. The mission, named Resilience, aimed for a flat area in Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold) a long and narrow region full of craters that stretches across the near side's northern tier. The lunar landing was part of a growing trend of private companies targeting the moon, with more failures than successes, including previous crashes by ispace and Intuitive Machines.
Malay Mail
4 days ago
- Business
- Malay Mail
Japanese company aborts Moon mission after losing contact with lander
TOKYO, June 6 — Japan's hopes of achieving its first soft landing on the Moon by a private company were dashed today when the mission was aborted over lost contact with the Resilience spacecraft during a daunting final descent. 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 touchdown on the lunar surface with its robotic lander. But it decided to end the mission as 'recovery of communication with the lander is unlikely', CEO Takeshi Hakamada told reporters. Resilience began falling during the landing attempt, and mission control fired the engines to slow it down, he said. 'We confirmed that the lander's position moved to almost vertical', but 'after the planned landing time we were not able to receive data that confirms its landing'. The failure comes two years after a prior mission ended in a crash. Touchdown had been scheduled for 4:17am Japan time today on the Mare Frigoris region of the Moon's northern hemisphere. But the mood in mission control turned sombre, and around 15 minutes after the scheduled time, announcers on a livestream said attempts to communicate with the lander would continue. They signed off with the message: 'Never quit the lunar quest.' On board the lander were several high-profile payloads: 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 model home designed by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg. Lunar soil The mission had also aimed to collect two lunar soil samples and sell them to Nasa for US$5,000 (RM21,143). 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. To date, only five nations have achieved soft lunar landings: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India, and Japan. Now, private companies are joining the race, promising cheaper and more frequent access to space. 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. Despite their rocket ride-share, Resilience took longer to reach the Moon than Blue Ghost, and ispace was now hoping for its own moment of glory, after its first mission resulted in an unsalvageable 'hard landing' in 2023. 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. — AFP
Japan Times
4 days ago
- Business
- Japan Times
Japanese space startup Ispace fails in second moon-landing mission
Japanese space startup Ispace's lunar mission ended in failure on Friday after the team was unable to make contact with its lander, with a hard landing appearing likely. The company had hoped it would become the first private company outside the United States to achieve a soft landing on the moon. The lander, named Resilience, was meant to touch down early morning Japan time near the center of the Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold) in the moon's northern hemisphere, as part of Mission 2 under Ispace's Hakuto-R program. However, after the planned landing time of 4:17 a.m., the team was unable to make contact with Resilience. At a news conference at 9 a.m., company founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said the team determined that it had to abandon the mission. 'We really wanted this mission to succeed but we were unable to pull off the landing,' he said. 'Along with the spirit of the name Resilience, we will analyze the issues that caused this and keep pressing forward for the future.' Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of Japanese space startup Ispace | Tomoko Otake Although it was confirmed that the lander was almost vertical, communication was subsequently lost, and no data indicating landing was received. While the cause of the communication failure remains unclear, the company said that there was a delay in obtaining measurements from the laser range finder, which measures the distance to the lunar surface, and that the lander was not able to slow down sufficiently to the speed required for landing. Given these circumstances, the company believes there is a high probability that the lander made a hard landing on the lunar surface. This was Ispace's second attempt at a lunar landing, following the failure of its Hakuto-R Mission 1 in April 2023. That mission also ended in a failure after a software error caused the lander to miscalculate its altitude and fall from about 5 kilometers above the surface. However, the company stressed that the issues this time are different. The Resilience lander launched on Jan. 15 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, alongside Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which reached the lunar surface in March via a separate trajectory. Ispace's mission took a longer, lower-energy route, using gravitational forces to gradually enter lunar orbit rather than relying on high-powered heavy propulsion. Resilience was part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver scientific instruments and technology demonstrations to the lunar surface. Its payload included a range of scientific and cultural items.
NHK
4 days ago
- Business
- NHK
Japanese firm yet to establish communications with lunar lander
A Tokyo-based venture company says it has yet to establish communications with its lunar lander that attempted to touch down on the Moon. It is aiming to become Japan's first private firm to have a craft successfully land on the lunar surface. The company, ispace, made the announcement shortly after 4:30 a.m. on Friday, Japan time. That was about 15 minutes after the spacecraft's planned landing time. The lander started to descend toward the lunar surface after 3 a.m. and was scheduled to touch down on a crater-less flat area in the Moon's northern hemisphere. The target landing site is part of the region called Mare Frigoris. A rocket carrying the craft lifted off from a launch site in the US state of Florida in January. The lander entered orbit about 100 kilometers above the Moon in late May. The company had failed in its first lunar landing attempt in 2023. It later overhauled its lander's control system and changed the touchdown target for the second attempt. Competition in lunar exploration has been intensifying. A US space exploration company became the first private firm to have an uncrewed lander successfully perform a lunar touchdown last year. Another US company followed suit in March this year.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Second attempt for Japanese company to reach moon ends in failure
An attempt to land a commercially built spacecraft on the surface of the moon looked to have ended in failure on Thursday, two years after its predecessor, launched by the same Japanese company, crashed following an uncontrolled descent. Resilience, an un-crewed vehicle from the Tokyo company ispace, would have made history as the first non-US commercial lander to make a successful touchdown, scheduled for 3.17pm ET Thursday (4.17am JST Friday) at Mare Frigoris (the Sea of Cold) on the far north of the moon. But the company's livestream covering the landing attempt ended almost 30 minutes later, with mission managers unable to establish communication with the craft, and its fate uncertain. 'Mission control center members will continuously attempt to communicate with the lander,' an ispace commentator said immediately before the feed was pulled, promising an update at a press briefing 'in a few hours'. It brought back memories of the April 2023 failure of ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, when communication with the spacecraft was lost around the scheduled time of landing. It was later established that a software error had led the lander to believe it had already touched down when it was still hurtling towards the lunar surface. Resilience launched on 15 January from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that carried the Blue Ghost lander manufactured by the Texas start-up Firefly Aerospace. Blue Ghost followed a speedier trajectory to the moon and made its own pioneering landing on 2 March. The apparent demise of Hakuto-R Mission 2 would be a significant setback for ispace's Venture Moon initiative that it said would be 'laying the groundwork' for an extended human presence on the moon. Ambitious plans include a lunar city with a thousand residents, the first arriving as early as 2040. It also hopes to eventually accommodate thousands more space tourists for shorter visits. 'Our goal is to build the cislunar economy, one in which the moon and Earth are economically and socially connected,' ispace chief executive Takeshi Hakamada said in a prepared statement released before Thursday's landing attempt. 'We view the success of the lunar landing as merely a stepping stone toward that goal. We strongly believe that this endeavor and its long-term success will contribute to making life on Earth sustainable for all humanity.' Resilience was set to deploy a small, European-built moon rover named Tenacious for a two-week mission. High-definition video footage and telemetry would have been beamed back to Earth for monitoring by the European Space Agency (Esa) and partners. The rover has a shovel intended to collect soil samples for evaluation as the search for evidence of the presence of life-sustaining water or ice on the moon continues. Nasa, the US space agency, will pay ispace $5,000 under an agreement signed in 2020 for a chunk of regolith it can study in furtherance of its own plans to land humans back on the moon for the first time since 1972, and ultimately on Mars. 'Tenacious is hopefully a very successful technological achievement, but beyond the technology it's also a symbol of the future of lunar exploration,' Géraldine Naja, Esa's director of commercialization, industry and competitiveness, told reporters earlier on Thursday. 'Esa is extremely proud and thrilled to support ispace Mission 2. This is a very good example of how we can support new space actors in Europe [and] commercialization. We are eager to support, eventually, a sustainable European-Japanese presence on the moon.' The 11lb (5kg) rover was also carrying a more quirky payload: Moonhouse, a model installation created by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, that would have become the first property on the moon, albeit in miniature form. The bright red Swedish-style house was to have provided a splash of color against the gray backdrop of the moon's northern reaches. 'It's a small house in a vast, empty place, a symbol of belonging, curiosity and vulnerability,' Genberg told in an interview published Thursday. 'I hope it invites people to reflect on our relationship to space, and to recognize the fragility and uniqueness of our own world.' While the governments of five countries – the US, Russia, China, India and Japan – have successfully landed un-crewed robotic lunar explorers, commercial efforts have seen more failures than successes in recent years. In addition to the previous ispace flop, two attempts by the Texas company Intuitive Machines (IM), with its Odysseus and Athena landers in February 2024 and March 2025 respectively, ended prematurely when both spacecraft toppled over on landing. Mare Frigoris is a flatter area of the moon, with fewer boulders than the landing sites chosen by IM and Firefly. Ispace also chose to take its time getting to the moon, with the five-month journey of Resilience during a so-called low-energy transfer allowing the company to thoroughly evaluate its systems and computer programs after blaming a software error for the 2023 crash landing. A contract with Nasa will see ispace attempting to send a larger rover to the moon on a mission scheduled for 2027.
