The Japanese mission fails in the final phase of landing on the Moon

The Japanese probe Resilience , launched by the Japanese company iSpace, has failed to successfully land on the Moon. After completing the final landing phase, communication with the spacecraft was lost just after 9:17 p.m. yesterday, and contact has not been established since. The company responsible for the project has terminated the mission.

Engineers at the Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, transmitted the commands to execute the landing sequence at 9:13 p.m. ET on Thursday. The Resilience lander began its descent phase from an altitude of approximately 100 kilometers to about 20 kilometers, the company explained in a statement on Friday. The craft was able to fire its engine to brake. “Although the module's position was confirmed to be near-vertical, telemetry was subsequently lost, and no data indicating a successful landing was received, even after the scheduled landing time had passed,” the company explained.

Mission managers believe the fault lay in the laser device that measures the distance to the lunar surface at the landing site, located in the Sea of ​​Cold, at the northern end of the satellite. Due to the delay in these measurements, Resilience was unable to brake sufficiently and crashed to the ground. "It is assumed that the module likely made a hard landing on the lunar surface," the company detailed in a statement.

“Since there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to quickly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained so far and work hard to identify the cause,” said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and executive director of iSpace, in a statement released by his organization. “We will strive to regain trust by providing a report with the findings to our shareholders, payload customers, Hakuto-R [mission name] partners, government officials, and all iSpace supporters.”

This was the second time the Japanese company had failed to land spacecraft on the lunar surface. Its first mission, in 2023 , also suffered a problem in the final stages of landing, and communication was never established. On board this second mission was Tenacious , a small exploration vehicle that was intended to be the first European to reach the satellite. The craft had been built by the European subsidiary of Ispace with funding from the Luxembourg space program.

Other experiments developed by private companies were on board Resilience, including a device to extract oxygen and hydrogen from lunar ice and a small algae crop, a potential food source for future astronauts traveling to the Moon. The company has not detailed the total cost of the mission, but its payload was estimated to cost around €14 million, Reuters reports.

This failure is a significant blow to a company that aimed to be a pioneer in landing on the Moon with robotic probes and exploiting lunar resources. The Japanese company has a future contract with NASA to carry payloads of up to 100 kilos to the satellite, valued at around €50 million. It also has a contract with the European Space Agency to launch a mission to explore the polar ice caps. So far, only two American companies have successfully landed on the satellite. Only five countries have achieved this feat: the United States, Russia (during the defunct Soviet Union), India, Japan, and China, which is the Western contender for landing astronauts on the satellite's surface before 2030.