A Japanese company had hoped that the second time would be the charm for putting a robotic lander on the moon. But it appears to have failed again.
Five hours after the landing time of 3:17 p.m. Eastern on Thursday came and went, officials at the Tokyo headquarters of Ispace said on Friday morning local time that they had not been able to get in contact with the Resilience spacecraft and presumed it had crashed.
Ispace is among the private companies that have emerged in recent years aiming to establish a profitable business by sending experiments and other payloads to the surface of the moon.
Its first robotic spacecraft made it to lunar orbit in 2023, but crashed as it attempted to land. Its second spacecraft launched in January and has been taking a roundabout path to the moon, entering orbit last month.
Around the scheduled time, the spacecraft performed its landing sequence, and contact was lost with the spacecraft. Soon, the looks of silent concern in the control room were eerily similar to what unfolded during Ispace’s first mission.
During the news conference, company officials said that the final part of the descent was slower than expected. That is similar to what occurred during the first mission, although the officials said it was too early to conclude whether the cause of the problem was similar.
“At this point, we do not know clearly about the cause,” Takeshi Hakamada, the chief executive of Ispace, said in translated remarks.
The loss of the second mission could lead NASA to rethink its plans to use a larger Ispace-designed lander for a mission to take science experiments to the far side of the moon. That mission, led by Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Mass., is part of the space agency’s efforts to tap into entrepreneurial companies for cheaper moon missions. It is currently scheduled for 2027.
What is Ispace, and what happened during its last moon mission?
Ispace emerged from a Japanese team that had aimed to win the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $20 million for the first privately financed venture to land on the moon. None of the X Prize teams got off the ground before the competition expired in 2018. Mr. Hakamada, who was the leader of the Japanese X Prize team, raised private financing to push forward.
The first Ispace mission aimed to land in the middle of Atlas Crater, a 54-mile-wide depression in the northeast quadrant on the near side of the moon. But Ispace lost contact with the lander during its final descent.
That spacecraft was originally supposed to land at Lacus Somniorum, a flat plain. It turned out that Ispace had embarrassingly not adequately updated the spacecraft’s navigation software when it changed the landing site to Atlas Crater. The software was confused as the lander passed over the two-mile-high crater rim and erroneously concluded that it was closer to the ground than it actually was.
The spacecraft was still about three miles above the surface when it thought it should be touching down. It then exhausted its propellant and plunged to its destruction, slamming into Atlas Crater at more than 200 miles per hour.
Where was Resilience trying to land?
Resilience did not head back to Atlas Crater, although the landing site was in roughly the same neighborhood — on the near side of the moon in the northern hemisphere. The spacecraft intended to set down in the middle of a lava plain known as Mare Frigoris, or Sea of Cold.
What was the Resilience lander carrying?
Resilience is essentially the same design as the Mission 1 spacecraft, but it had different payloads aboard.
Those include a water electrolyzer experiment, which splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen; a food production experiment; a deep-space radiation probe; and a small rover named Tenacious that was developed and built by Ispace’s European subsidiary.
Although this is not a NASA mission, it will collect two soil samples — one scooped up by the rover, the other from material that settles on the spacecraft’s landing pads — and sell them to the agency for $5,000 each.
The transactions have no scientific value, because the samples will remain on the moon. Instead, they are meant to help strengthen the United States government’s position that while no nation on Earth can claim sovereignty of the moon or other parts of the solar system under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, nations and companies can own and profit from what they extract from the moon.
Resilience and Tenacious are also designed to operate for about two weeks, until the sun sets at the end of the lunar day.
What else has landed on the moon this year?
Resilience shared a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with another lunar lander, Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas.
The Blue Ghost spacecraft, financed by NASA, took a quicker path to the moon, landing on March 2, and completed an almost flawless two-week mission.
Another NASA-financed lander, by Intuitive Machines of Houston, landed on the moon a few days later, but toppled over. Although Intuitive Machines was able to communicate with the lander, named Athena, it ran out of energy a day later and most of the mission’s objectives were not accomplished.
Last year, Intuitive Machine’s first lunar lander, Odysseus, also toppled over.
Two other robotic landers are scheduled to launch this year, one from Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh and one from Blue Origin of Kent, Wash.
Astrobotic’s lander, Griffin, will transport a rover, built by another company Venturi Astrolab, to the moon.
Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is planning to send a robotic lander to test out technologies that will be used in a larger spacecraft designed to take NASA astronauts to the lunar surface.
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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