A photo of the Earth during a lunar eclipse taken from the moon by the spacecraft “Hakuto-R”
space
Another lander has crashed on the moon. The lunar lander Hakuto-R, launched by Japanese company ispace in December 2022, was scheduled to land on the moon on April 25. If successful, it would have been the first privately funded moon landing. However, like the previous attempt, it crashed.
“Although we confirmed that we had established communication by the end of the landing, we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the moon because of the loss of communication,” said the founder and CEO of ispace. Takeshi Hakamada a few minutes after the landing attempt. “Our engineers will continue to investigate the situation.”
In 2019, Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL attempted to send its Beresheet spacecraft to make a similar lunar landing, but part of its engine failed and it crashed into the lunar surface. It is not yet clear why the Hakuto-R lander was unable to land safely.
A trip to the moon can be short, just a few days, but Hakuto-R didn’t follow a direct path, but took a circuitous route to save fuel, using the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun. Additional pushes during the 3 month voyage. It arrived in lunar orbit in March and has since slowly orbited toward the moon, probing its surface to make sure the landing site was safe.
Perhaps the most difficult part of the mission was when the spacecraft had to decelerate from over 750 kilometers per hour to zero in less than three minutes. At a pre-landing press conference, the company’s CTO Ryo Ujiie explained that slowing down the Hakuto-R for a soft landing was “bringing on the brakes of a bicycle running on the edge of a ski jump”. I gave an example. If the Hakuto R could not slow down enough in the end, it may have crash landed.
The lander did not crash alone, but carried different payloads for different countries and customers. Among them was a small rover called Rashid for the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in the United Arab Emirates and an even smaller two-wheeled robot for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Two other companies will launch lunar landers sometime in 2023, as ispace will investigate the crash and apply the resulting knowledge to its planned second and third launches. Both of these companies are based in the United States. Intuitive Machines has a Nova-C Lander and has an Astrobotic Peregrine Lander. With this crash, they are still vying for the first successful civilian moon landing.
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