A private lunar lander from Japan crashed while attempting a touchdown on Friday, the latest casualty in the commercial rush to the Moon.
Tokyo-based company ispace declared the mission a failure several hours after communication was lost with the lander.
Flight controllers scrambled to gain contact, but were met with only silence and said they were concluding the mission.
Communications ceased less than two minutes before the spacecraft’s scheduled landing on the Moon with a mini rover. Until then, the descent from lunar orbit seemed to be going well.
Takeshi Hakamada, ispace chief executive officer and founder, apologised to everyone who contributed to the mission, the second lunar strikeout for the company.
Two years ago, the company’s first moonshot ended in a crash landing, giving rise to the name Resilience for its successor lander.
Resilience carried a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist’s toy-size red house for placement on the Moon’s dusty surface.
Company officials said it was too soon to know whether the same problem doomed both missions.
“This is the second time that we were not able to land. So we really have to take it very seriously,” Mr Hakamada told reporters. He stressed the company would press ahead with more lunar missions.
A preliminary analysis indicates the laser system for measuring the altitude did not work as planned and the lander descended too fast, officials said.
“Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface,” the company said in a written statement.
Long the province of governments, the Moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than successes along the way.
Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month.
It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which reached the Moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March.
Another US company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the Moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the south pole and was declared dead within hours.
Resilience was targeting the top of the Moon, a less treacherous place than the shadowy bottom.
The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side’s northern tier.
Plans had called for the 7.5ft Resilience to beam back pictures within hours and for the lander to lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface this weekend.
Made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace’s European-built rover — named Tenacious — sported a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for Nasa.
The rover was going to stick close to the lander, going in circles at a speed of less than one inch per second.
