Private Japanese Lunar Lander Crashes Into Moon's Surface
After launching into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in January and spending nearly six months on a gravity-fueled journey toward the Moon, Resilience was poised to land Thursday afternoon (early Friday morning in Japan). If all went well, the lander would touch down near the center of Mare Frigoris, a lunar sea near the Moon's north pole.
But all did not go well. One minute and 45 seconds before Resilience's scheduled touchdown, mission control abruptly lost communication with the spacecraft. In the minutes immediately following the scheduled landing (3:17 p.m. EST, or 4:17 a.m. JST), Ispace terminated its live stream, noting that it would continue to attempt contact with Resilience. That's the message the company continued to communicate on social media for roughly two hours after Resilience went quiet.
The last telemetry update Ispace provided before terminating its live stream. Credit: Ispace
Then, at nearly 8:30 p.m. EST, Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada appeared in an impromptu media conference to confirm that the mission was a failure. Mission control would no longer attempt to reestablish communications with its spacecraft.
"This is our second failure, and about these results, we have to really take it seriously,' Hakamada said in translation, referring to the company's first attempt to place a lander on the Moon in April 2023.
Though Ispace hasn't had enough time to conduct a thorough postmortem investigation, its engineers believe Resilience experienced a "hard landing" on the lunar surface, according to a statement published Friday morning.
"The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values," the statement reads. "As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface."
Ispace will nonetheless attempt a soft landing again in 2027, when its third and fourth missions aim a new spacecraft, Apex 1.0, at the far side of the Moon.
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