Space

Japan's Hakuto-R Moon landing ends in silence

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A depiction of the Hakuto-R lander on the Moon's surface
ispace
Hakuto-R mission profile
ispace
A depiction of the Hakuto-R lander on the Moon's surface
ispace
Hakuto-R landing sequence
ispace
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Japan's attempt to put a privately-owned spacecraft on the Moon appears to have ended in failure. Scheduled to land in the Mare Frigoris region at 16:40 GMT, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander lost contact with Mission Control in Nihonbashi, Tokyo shortly before the planned touchdown.

The exact fate of Hakuto-R still remains to be confirmed as engineers at ispace, the lunar resource development company that developed the lander, seek to establish contact or find evidence as to what happened. It's possible that the spacecraft landed but suffered a malfunction, or that there was a system failure during the descent and the vehicle crashed on the lunar surface.

Today's event marks the end of a four-month mission that began when Hakuto-R lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida atop a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket on December 11, 2022. The demonstrator spacecraft was privately owned, developed, and operated by ispace, but it also carried payloads for the Japanese government and international customers. These included the Rashid rover of the Emirates Lunar Mission and the JAXA/Tomy SORA-Q transformable lunar robot.

The video below recaps coverage of the landing attempt.

Source: ispace

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5 comments
Smokey_Bear
Humans - 0
Space Aliens - 1
God Damn Space Aliens!!!
CraigAllenCorson
Will LRO be taking a look at the site of the attempted landing?
Seasherm
Too bad. I hope they can establish what happened so they can learn. There is going to be a lot of this. Failures are how we learn. Experience is having made all of the mistakes.
Louis Vaughn
I agree w/ @Smokey_Bear! We know from released US Gov't recordings They are here, real, and watching closely. They probably took it to study what we're up to. For every mission we send up now, we should also send a watcher to catch them in the act; like door cams. % Clever buggers %
paul04
left earth in dec, just tried landing on moon. ? apollo missions took 2-3 days from earth to moon. what has this spacecraft been doing for 4 months?