A Japanese space mission hoping to make history as the third ever private lunar landing has ended in failure, after ispace's Resilience lander smashed into the moon at some point after 7.13pm UTC on 5 June.
The lander had successfully descended to about 20 km above the moon's surface, but ispace's mission control lost contact shortly afterwards, when the probe fired its main engine for the final descent, and received no further communication.
The company said in a statement that a laser tool the craft used to measure its distance to the surface appeared to have malfunctioned, which would have caused the lander to slow down insufficiently, making the most likely outcome a crash landing.
"Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyse the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause," said ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada in the statement.
If it had been successful, Resilience would have been the second private lunar landing of this year and the third ever. It would also have marked the first non-US company to land on lunar soil, after iSpace's first attempt, the Hakuto-R mission, ended in failure in 2023.
The Resilience lander started its moon-bound journey on 15 January, when it launched aboard a SpaceX rocket together with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander. While Blue Ghost touched down on 2 March, Resilience took a more circuitous route, travelling into deep space before doubling back and entering lunar orbit on 6 May. This winding path was necessary to land in the hard-to-reach northern plain called Mare Frigoris, where no previous moon mission had explored.
There were six experiments on board Resilience, including a device for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, a module for producing food from algae and a deep-space radiation monitor. The lander also contained a 5-kilogram rover, called Tenacious, that would have explored and photographed the lunar surface during the two weeks that Resilience was scheduled to run for.
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday June 06, @05:18PM (5 children)
Why did they stop using radar to find the moon? Too expensive?
(Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Friday June 06, @05:42PM
I don't know, but it can't be as expensive as crashing into the moon...
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Friday June 06, @06:53PM (1 child)
radar is a lot cheaper, but lidar is lighter, lower power, 10x faster scan rate, 10x higher resolution, and 10x longer range.
You're looking at like 10-20 kilos, 100 watts for COTS products. Landing Radars just can't compete, the antenna alone is heavier than the entire lidar system.
I think the range and precision is the killer feature; rockets benefit a lot from burn 1g of propellant now rather than burn 10g of propellant a kilometer later to get to the same place.
Some day they're going to be putting this stuff in civilian drones on Earth, not just lunar landers and military drones, and that's going to be some crazy times.
There's a pretty good NTRS powerpoint presentation that's only a couple years out of date at
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230004117/downloads/MSS%202023_Landing%20Lidar%20Overview.pdf [nasa.gov]
Controversial opinion: I might be wrong but I think it better than 50/50 that as data storage and networking gets cheaper, on the earth, GPS use might actually decline as you can't spoof lidar (or... can you?) and GPS can't provide 200 hz update rates (10 hz is pretty good state of the art LOL)
Another controversial opinion: Again I might be wrong but I think it better than 50/50 odds that inertial platforms are going to die out because of lidar. Who needs single chip mags/gyros/accelerometers to land a drone on earth if your lidar gives better faster data anyway?
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Sunday June 08, @05:50PM
You can spoof lidar just like radar (they are just EM waves after all). There is not much information about it in the public domain, but hackaday [hackaday.com] gives us some examples of what can be done with COTS equipment on autonomous vehicles.
They probably will not die out, for reasons mentioned above. All technologies made by man can be unmade by man, so why rely on a single technology that can be spoofed when you can use multiple ones in order to infer the state of reality? Yes in theory you can spoof all the inputs, but it would be much harder to do (you would have to spoof all of them in a way that they concur with one another, otherwise erroneous input can be detected and counter-actions taken). After all inertial systems are still in use despite GPS existing for decades now, if for no other reason than not having a single point of failure.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Friday June 06, @10:46PM (1 child)
Laser rangefinders are more accurate than radar. They are available off the shelf for space application so it is a little strange that that this one failed.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday June 08, @12:06AM
Laser rangefinders are no longer all that expensive nor heavy. Even the local hardware store likely has several in stock. I'll bet future designs will include redundant sensors. I recall all too well us losing aircraft over malfunctioning pitot tubes...with no redundancy. Lost so much over something so simple.
My sympathies to the builders ( as in "loss of a loved one") for the loss. This kind of thing is fraught with risk. I consider it damn near impossible if it's being micromanaged by bean counters, when " haste makes waste " becomes the far more likely outcome.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Informative) by corey on Saturday June 07, @12:05AM
> A Japanese space mission hoping to make history as the third ever private lunar landing has ended in failure, after ispace's Resilience lander smashed into the moon at some point after 7.13pm UTC on 5 June.
Intuitive Machines, a private company, put a lander on the moon in March, but it tipped over. It would have been/is the third (it landed ok). It carried a rover by Lunar Outpost.
https://www.space.com/the-universe/moon/intuitive-machines-lands-private-athena-lander-near-moon-south-pole-historic-touchdown [space.com]
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday June 07, @06:27PM
... not so resilient after all
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti