Japan’s first private unmanned spacecraft Hakuto-RM1 failed to land on the moon. The Hakuto-R M1 lander, made by Japanese company iSpace, carried a tennis ball-shaped robot and exploratory rover.
It was expected to land on the surface of the moon on Tuesday night, but it is believed that the vehicle crashed after losing contact with the lander and hit the surface of the moon. But engineers are looking into everything to know what really happened.
‘It was only 295 feet (89 meters) away from the lunar surface’, said the iSpace Chief Executive Officer Takeshi Hakamada, ‘about 25 minutes after the planned landing time. But we are unable to communicate with the lander. So now we have to assume that we couldn’t complete the lunar landing. But even if the dream of this mission is not fulfilled, it is quite significant for us. Because we have gained a lot of information and experience from this entire activity.’
The Japanese spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in December last year on a Falcon 9 rocket made by SpaceX. It took five months to reach its destination.
The height of the lander on the spacecraft was 2 meters, weight 340 kgs. It was much smaller than the standard spacecraft sent to the moon before.
The rover reached the lunar orbit about a month ago. Hakuto-R was supposed to land on the lunar surface on Tuesday from an altitude of 100 kilometers above the lunar surface at a speed of about 6,000 kilometers per hour.
And after landing on the northern hemisphere of the moon, there were also plans to deploy two payloads or satellites to test the soil, topography and atmosphere there.
So far, only three countries have successfully landed a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, the United States, Russia and China. But all these missions were government run.
