Watch ispace attempt to land on the moon for the first time:
After five long months journeying through space, ispace's Hakuto-R lander is ready to greet the lunar surface.The Japanese company is expecting to land Hakuto-R at 12:40 PM EST today. If successful, this first mission will no doubt be a huge boon for ispace's ambitious plans to send two subsequent landers to the moon in 2024 and 2025. It would also make them the first private company to land on the moon, and the first spacecraft from Japan to do so. (China, the United States, and the USSR have been the only nations to reach the lunar surface.)This first mission, appropriately named Mission 1, kicked off last December when a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the lander into space. Since then, the lander has performed a number of maneuvers to stay on track in its path to the moon. At its farthest point, Hakuto-R traveled as much as 1.4 million kilometers from Earth.
The livestream will kick-off one hour prior to landing at 11:40 EST.
Link to stream.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday April 25, @01:57PM (3 children)
Eastern Standard Time (EST) is UTC -0500, so the streaming is scheduled to start 16:40 UTC.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by TheKLB on Tuesday April 25, @02:04PM
Except EST isn't a thing right now... we're currently living in EDT, which is UTC -4.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @02:53PM (1 child)
The livestream link is currently showing about -7 minutes, so it appears the stream will start at 11am EDT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @03:13PM
Or not... the countdown stopped/froze at 11am EDT (3pm UTC).
In the meantime, YouTube offered up a concert in LA by The Comet Is Coming (just pre-Covid),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbsK1_goV_0 [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snospar on Tuesday April 25, @03:15PM
This Link [youtube.com] shows the landing is just under an hour and a half away.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @03:24PM
Who is the director this time? Kubrick isn't around anymore.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by squeedles on Tuesday April 25, @03:49PM
Hadn't seen much about this, but was curious how large a mass a Falcon 9 could get to lunar orbit, as opposed to LEO.
TFA seemed to imply some complicated orbital mechanics, and it took 5mo to get there, so obviously a very low energy path, but the lander is one metric ton, which was much larger than I expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_1 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 25, @04:44PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @04:49PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @05:10PM
(Score: 1) by UncleBen on Tuesday April 25, @05:19PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @04:55PM
The stream from ispace (in tfa) showed about 75,000 viewers. Any idea how many other sites were re-streaming (different languages, etc) this first commercial mission?
Somehow we (humans) seem to have our priorities all mixed up. For example the NASCAR race last weekend (pretty much USA only) had 4.5 million viewers, https://www.jayski.com/2023/04/25/talladega-tv-ratings-9/ [jayski.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday April 25, @05:19PM (4 children)
They maintained communications all the way through the landing phase up to, presumably, contact with the lunar surface. Although communications might be regained it looks very unlikely. For example, it could be a cable that has been jolted loose or an antenna that has been damaged. Neither of these is reparable but the rest of the craft might be in good working order. We will probably not know for a long time. However they have all the flight data from the entire landing sequence up until the very very end. That is all valuable data which will be used for missions 2 and 3.
It is no mean feat to actually get an object onto the lunar surface. We have become blasé about much of the space exploration program. It is still a difficult endeavour - had they been successful on their very first attempt I think that many people would have been surprised. But I also think we would have been pleased if they had at least managed to establish communications after landing, let alone carry out the full scientific program that was planned for it.
Nice try guys. As they keep saying - "do not quit on the lunar quest."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Tuesday April 25, @05:46PM
I was able to turn on the Youtube streaming at the right time but they cut to some stock footage which I eventually paused. When I unpaused it, I caught only a little bit before their admonition to not give up the quest and then the stream stopped. I guessed at that point it had failed and that was confirmed when the window filled with video recommendations on the theme of failure.
It's too bad. I had no expectations that a private company would pull off a successful landing but it would have been a nice advancement for society.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25, @06:09PM (2 children)
My guess, a slapstick landing -- Hakuto-R got down to the surface but it was a boulder field and it tipped over on touchdown. IMO, no current AI is going to match Neil Armstrong's piloting of the LEM/LM to a smoother spot than the original Apollo target. He had rehearsed that landing many times in a flying simulator -- https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/neil-armstrongs-apollo-11-close-call [si.edu]
I wonder if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter [wikipedia.org] will be able to take pictures of the landing site and see what happened? From that Wiki page,
> In 2019, LRO found the crash site of Indian moon lander Vikram.
and the LRO is apparently still mapping other possible landing sites.
Or maybe there is another camera in lunar orbit?
For curiosity, I checked the Hubble stats, in visible light it can only resolve about 300 feet at lunar distance, so it's no help to an accident investigation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday April 26, @03:13PM (1 child)
I'm submitting an observation request to the LRO's LROC main camera team. I've never done this before, so I don't know if they will let me know if they've approved it or not or if it will just show up in the next PDS data upload. We'll see. The iSpace team has almost certainly also submitted a similar request.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @09:28PM
Very cool, you win the internet today!
Please keep us posted (somehow) if you hear anything back.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday April 26, @03:19PM (1 child)
The team had telemetry from the spacecraft through much of the descent, but contact was lost near scheduled touchdown.
A notable thing from the livestream farewell was the leadership said they still have two more missions lined up. I'm curious if the spacecraft are already built or not. Either way, I wish them the best of luck in their next attempts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26, @09:25PM
I was on at the start of the live stream and they showed their timeline. It seems that the lander for Mission 2 is fully funded and being built now, they said their plans were to incorporate learning from Mission 1 into M2 (most likely being software changes, from the way I heard it).