Japanese spacecraft goes down during attempted Moon landing
It is two years since ispace's failed inaugural mission.
Resilience was part of ispace's bid to become the first company outside the United States to achieve a Moon landing.
Resilience targeted Mare Frigoris, a basaltic plain about 900 kilometres from the Moon's north pole.
The company's live-streamed flight data showed Resilience's altitude suddenly falling to zero shortly before the planned touchdown time of 4:17am on Friday, Japanese time, following an hour-long descent from lunar orbit.
The company said in the broadcast: "We haven't been able to confirm [communication]."
It said control centre members would "continuously attempt to communicate with the lander".
Footage from the control room showed the nervous faces of ispace engineers.
A room of more than 500 ispace employees, shareholders, sponsors and government officials abruptly grew silent during a public viewing event at mission partner Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp in the wee hours in Tokyo.
The status of Resilience remains unclear, and ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada will hold a press conference about the outcome of the mission today, the company said.
In 2023, ispace's first lander crashed into the Moon's surface due to inaccurate recognition of its altitude. Software remedies have been implemented, while the hardware design is mostly unchanged in Resilience, the company has said.
Resilience carried a four-wheeled rover built by ispace's Luxembourg subsidiary and five external payloads worth $24 million, including scientific instruments from Japanese firms and a Taiwanese university.
Following the landing, the 2.3 metre-high lander and the microwave-sized rover were scheduled to begin 14 days of exploration until the arrival of a freezing-cold lunar night, including capturing images of regolith, the Moon's fine-grained surface material, on a contract with US space agency NASA.
Shares of ispace more than doubled this year on growing investor hopes for the second mission, before calming in recent days. As of Thursday, ispace had a market capitalisation of more than 110 billion yen ($1.2 billion).
Resilience in January shared a SpaceX rocket launch with Firefly's Blue Ghost lander, which took a faster trajectory to the Moon and touched down successfully in March.
Intuitive Machines, which last year marked the world's first touchdown of a commercial lunar lander, made its second attempt in March but the lander Athena ended on its side on the lunar surface just as in the first mission.
Japan last year became the world's fifth country to achieve a soft lunar landing after the former Soviet Union, the US, China and India, when the national Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency achieved the touchdown of its SLIM lander, yet also in a toppled position.
Reuters
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