A Japanese company, ispace, has apparently lost contact with its spacecraft just moments before touchdown on the moon, and now the mission has been deemed a failure. The lander, named Hakuto, was descending onto the lunar surface at a speed of about 16mph, traveling the final 33 feet, when communications suddenly stopped. The spacecraft was carrying a mini lunar rover for the United Arab Emirates, a toylike robot from Japan, and even items from private customers.
Flight controllers in Tokyo struggled to reestablish contact with the lander, but as the minutes ticked by with no response, it became clear that something had gone wrong. “We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface,” said Takeshi Hakamada, the company’s founder and CEO, in a statement. If successful, ispace would have been the first private business to achieve a lunar landing, following in the footsteps of only three governments: Russia, the United States, and China.
The Hakuto spacecraft, named after the Japanese word for white rabbit, was targeting the Atlas crater, a massive depression over 50 miles across and just over a mile deep, located in the north-eastern section of the moon’s near side. The spacecraft took a long, roundabout route to the moon after its December liftoff, providing stunning photographs of Earth along the way.
The HAKUTO-R lunar lander
The loss of contact may have been a result of the lander crashing onto the moon’s surface, although the exact cause is still unknown. The failure of the mission is a setback not only for ispace but also for the private space industry as a whole, which has been gaining momentum in recent years. Despite the disappointment, the Japanese company is expected to learn valuable lessons from the incident and continue to push the boundaries of space exploration.
