A private lunar lander from Japan has fallen silent while descending to the moon with a mini rover and its fate was unknown.
The Tokyo-based company ispace said on Friday its lander dropped out of lunar orbit as planned and everything seemed to be going well. But there was no immediate word on the outcome, following the hour-long descent.
As the tension mounted, the company’s livestream of the attempted landing came to an abrupt end. More than two hours later, ispace said it had yet to establish communication with the spacecraft and was still working to gain contact.
Two years ago the company’s first moonshot ended in a crash landing, giving rise to the name Resilience for its successor lander. Resilience carried a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist’s toy-size red house for placement on the moon’s dusty surface.
Long the province of governments, the moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than wins along the way.
Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.
Resilience was targeting the top of the moon, a less forbidding place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side’s northern tier.
Plans had called for Resilience to beam back pictures within hours and for the lander to lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface this weekend.
The rover, weighing just 5kg, was going to stick close to the lander, going in circles at a speed of less than a couple of centimetres per second. It was capable of venturing up to one kilometre from the lander and should be operational throughout the two-week mission, the period of daylight.
Takeshi Hakamada, chief executive and founder of ispace, considered the latest moonshot “merely a steppingstone,” with its next, much bigger lander launching by 2027 with NASA involvement, and even more to follow.
Minutes before the attempted landing, Hakamada assured everyone that ispace had learned from its first failed mission.
“Engineers did everything they possibly could” to ensure success this time, he said.
