Isbis says the Japanese lunar probe likely crashed

A Japanese company has lost contact with a small robotic spacecraft it was sending to the moon. Analysis of data from the rover indicates that it ran out of propellant during its final approach and instead of landing softly it crashed into the lunar surface.

After firing its main engine, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, built by the Japanese company Ispace, slid out of lunar orbit. About an hour later, at 12:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the lander, about 7.5 feet high, was expected to touch down at the Atlas Crater, a 54-mile-wide feature in the northeast quadrant of the moon’s near side. .

But after the time of landing, no signal was received from the spacecraft. In a live video broadcast by the company, a speck of silence enveloped the Tokyo control room as Ispace engineers, mostly young men and from around the world, looked anxiously at their screens.

In a statement released Wednesday morning in Japan, the company stated that Ispace engineers noted that the estimated remaining propellant was “at a minimum level and shortly thereafter the descent speed rapidly increased.”

In other words, the spacecraft ran out of fuel and fell.

Then communications with the spacecraft were lost. “Based on this, it was determined that there is a high probability that the probe eventually made a hard landing on the lunar surface,” the company said.

The investigation will now have to determine why the spacecraft appeared to misjudge its altitude. Analysis indicates that it was still high when it should have been on the ground.

In an interview, Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said he was “very, very proud” of the result though. He said, “I’m not disappointed.”

Mr. Hakamada said that with the data obtained from the spacecraft, the company will be able to apply the “lessons learned” to its next two missions.

The Hakuto-R spacecraft launched in December and took a circuitous but energy-efficient path to the Moon, entering lunar orbit in March. Over the past month, engineers have been checking the lander’s systems before embarking on a landing attempt.

The Ispace lander could be the first step toward a new paradigm of space exploration, in which governments, research institutions and companies send science experiments and other cargo to the moon.

The start of this lunar transfer transition to other companies will now have to wait for later this year. Two commercial landers, built by US companies and funded by NASA, are scheduled to be launched on the lunar surface in the coming months.

NASA created the Lunar Commercial Payload Service, or CLPS, program in 2018, because buying trips on private spacecraft and equipment to the Moon promises to be cheaper than building its own. In addition, NASA hopes to stimulate a new commercial industry around the moon, and competition among lunar companies is likely to drive down costs. The program is built in part on a similar effort that has successfully provided transportation to and from the International Space Station.

But so far, NASA doesn’t have much to show for its efforts. The first two missions later in the year, by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines of Houston, are behind schedule, and some of the companies NASA has selected to bid for CLPS missions have already gone out of business.

Ispace is planning a second mission using a lander of roughly the same design next year. In 2026, a larger Ispace lander is slated to carry NASA payloads to the far side of the Moon as part of a CLPS mission led by Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Two countries – Japan and the United Arab Emirates – lost payloads on the lander. The Japanese space agency JAXA wanted to test a two-wheeled transformable lunar robot, and the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai sent a small spacecraft to explore the landing site. Each was their countries first robotic explorer on the moon.

Other payloads included an NGK Spark Plug solid-state battery test unit, an artificial intelligence-powered flight computer and 360-degree cameras from Canadensys Aerospace.

During the space race more than 50 years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union successfully sent robotic spacecraft to the lunar surface. Recently, China has landed an intact spacecraft three times on the surface of the moon.

However, other attempts failed.

Beresheet, an attempt by SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization, crashed in April 2019 when a command sent to the spacecraft inadvertently shut down the main engine, causing the spacecraft to collapse to its destruction.

Eight months later, India’s Vikram probe veered off course about a mile above the surface while trying to land, and then it calmed down.

If the Ispace probe crashes, it may take some time for the telemetry sent from the spacecraft to understand what happened. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has finally located the crash sites of Beresheet and Vikram, and may also be able to find M1’s resting place in Atlas crater.

Ispace isn’t the only private space company that has struggled in the first few months of 2023. New rocket models made by SpaceX, ABL Space Systems, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Relativity have failed during their first-ever flights, though some have made it to space. more than others. . Virgin Orbit’s last rocket launch fails and the company later declares bankruptcy, though it continues to work toward another launch.

At the same time, launch frequency is higher than ever, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket having dozens of successful liftoffs so far in 2023. The Arianespace rocket has also sent an ESA probe on a mission to Jupiter.