Ispace's Resilience Lunar Mission Faces Setback: Impact on Future Moon Missions
A Japanese company, Ispace, faced another setback in its attempt to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. The Resilience spacecraft failed to establish contact after its scheduled landing time, leading officials to believe it had crashed on the lunar near side. Ispace is one of the private companies venturing into lunar missions to send experiments and payloads to the moon. The company's first spacecraft crashed during a landing attempt in 2023, and the second spacecraft, Resilience, launched in January, entered lunar orbit last month.
During the landing sequence, contact was lost with Resilience, and the spacecraft likely made a hard landing due to the descent rate not slowing as expected. Ispace's CEO, Takeshi Hakamada, mentioned that the laser instrument measuring the spacecraft's altitude might have contributed to the issue. The failure of the second mission could impact NASA's plans to use a larger Ispace lander for a future mission to the moon's far side, scheduled for 2027.
Ispace originated from a Japanese team competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, aiming to land on the moon. The first Ispace mission failed due to navigation software issues, leading to a crash in Atlas Crater. Resilience was intended to land in Mare Frigoris, carrying various experiments, including a water electrolyzer experiment, food production experiment, radiation probe, and a rover named Tenacious. The mission also involved selling soil samples to NASA to assert ownership rights over lunar resources.
Resilience shared a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace, which successfully landed on the moon in March. Another NASA-financed lander by Intuitive Machines landed but toppled over, failing to achieve most mission objectives. Two more robotic landers are set to launch this year, one from Astrobotic Technology and another from Blue Origin, testing technologies for future lunar missions.