A planned first moon landing by a private company is thought to have ended in a crash-landing, as Japan's iSpace Inc lost contact with its lander vehicle in the final seconds of its approach to the lunar surface.
Shown via a live-streamed video, the Tokyo-based company's spacecraft was firing reverse thrusters to slow its landing on the moon yesterday evening, decelerating from over 6,000 kilometres per hour to around 30 kph in its final approach before communications were lost with controlling staff at HAKUTO-R mission control on Earth.
Just metres away from a landing it seems that the vehicle ran out of fuel, meaning it had no way to slow its descent and so crashed into the moon.
The recently Tokyo-listed company said the lander was in the correct vertical position as it carried out its final approach
"Shortly after the scheduled landing time, no data was received indicating a touchdown," ispace said, adding that engineers soon identified that "remaining propellant reached at the lower threshold and shortly afterward the descent speed rapidly increased [and] the communication loss happened".
"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."
It was an unsuccessful end for a mission that launched from Earth in December on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The Hakuto lander had been conserving fuel by using a ballistic trajectory, which involved swooping 1.4mln kilometres into deep space and swinging around back to an elliptical orbit around the moon last month.
Its final approach on the live video stream involved dipping around the dark side of the moon and reappearing for the landing process, carried out while tense bosses and engineers waited down on Earth.
After the failed conclusion, ispace said its Mission 1 achieved eight of its planned "successes" in coming so close, adding "valuable data and know-how from the beginning to nearly the end", which it plans to help enable its second and third missions in 2024 and 2025, with the latter contributing to NASA’s Artemis program.
"Although we do not expect to complete the lunar landing at this time, we believe that we have fully accomplished the significance of this mission, having acquired a great deal of data and experience by being able to execute the landing phase. What is important is to feed this knowledge and learning back to Mission 2 and beyond so that we can make the most of this experience,” said founder and chief executive Takeshi Hakamada.