A model of the lander in HAKUTO-R lunar exploration program by Japan's ispace in Tokyo, on April 26.KIM KYUNG-HOON/Reuters
The latest attempt by a private company to place a spacecraft on the moon’s surface has ended in failure.
Engineers with Japan’s ispace Inc. lost contact with their lunar lander just as it was expected to touch down on the moon’s near side at 12:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
Following an analysis of data from the mission the aerospace company issued a statement on Wednesday that suggested the lander, designated Hakuto-R M1, ran out of propellant as it was nearing its landing site in a lunar crater called Atlas. It then began to drop with rapidly increasing speed.
“Based on this, it has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the Moon’s surface,” the company said.
Several minutes after engineers were unable to re-establish contact with the spacecraft, Takeshi Hakamada, the company’s founder and chief executive, told viewers who were watching the event via livestream that “we have to assume that we could not complete the landing.”
The information that the spacecraft transmitted before its demise could prove invaluable for the next two lunar missions that ispace already has planned.
The company is one of several aiming to provide a lunar delivery service for companies or institutions that are looking for an inexpensive route to the moon to test hardware or conduct science experiments.
Hakuto-R M1 was carrying a set of cameras built by Canadensys Aerospace, an Ontario-based company, which were to have provided the probe’s first view of its surroundings on the lunar surface. Another Canadian company, Mission Control Space Services of Ottawa, was preparing to test an artificial intelligence-enabled computer system for classifying geological features.
Had the landing succeeded, the lander would also have deployed a tiny two-wheeled rover developed in Japan as well as the four-wheeled Rashid rover built by the United Arab Emirates.
The 135-day mission began with a launch from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket on Dec. 11. The spacecraft entered lunar orbit on March 21.
Christian Sallaberger, the chief executive of Canadensys, said that despite the mission’s disappointing conclusion, it had already achieved several important milestones and the majority of its mission objectives. The company’s camera system was tested during the lander’s flight to the moon and performed well, he said.
“We had some great shots of the moon from orbit,” he said. “It allowed us to refine and update a lot of things about the camera.”
He said that in the next two years, the company has been contracted to provide more than 20 cameras for operations on the lunar surface on a number of missions.
To date, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China have successfully landed working spacecraft on the moon. India’s space agency and the Israeli organization SpaceIL both tried to land hardware on the moon in 2019 but neither succeeded.