Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, April 26 (Xinhua)-- Japan's first commercial lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace tried to land on the lunar surface in the early hours of this morning, but then disappeared.

According to the latest official announcement from ispace, the HAKUTO-R Mission-1 lunar lander was scheduled to land on the lunar surface at around 01:40 Japan Standard time (CTOnews.com). As of 8 a.m. Japan Standard time (7 a.m. Beijing time) on April 26, 2023, communication between the lander and the mission control center had been lost, even after landing, and the success of the mission milestone had been determined not to be achieved.

The concept map of ▲ HAKUTO-R 's lunar landing announced that, based on currently available data, the HAKUTO-R mission control center at Nippon Bridge in Tokyo confirmed that the lander was in a vertical position when it approached the lunar surface at the end of the execution. Shortly after the scheduled landing time, no data indicating the landing was received. Ispace engineers monitored the estimated remaining propellant to reach the lower limit, and soon the rate of decline increased rapidly, followed by a communication outage. Judging from this, it is very likely that the lander will eventually hard land on the lunar surface.

In order to find out the root cause of this situation, ispace engineers are currently conducting a detailed analysis of the telemetry data obtained until the end of the landing sequence and clarify the details after the analysis is completed.

According to the official announcement, ispace has set 10 milestones between the launch and landing of HAKUTO-R Mission 1. Based on the current progress, it has successfully achieved 1 to 8 milestones, while the 9 and 10 milestones (successfully landing on the moon and establishing communications) have declared failure.

Ispace said it would make full use of the data and expertise gained during the operation and landing of Mission 1 to improve the technology maturity of Mission 2 in 2024 and Mission 3 in 2025.

Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, said: "although we do not expect to complete a moon landing, we believe we have accomplished the significance of this mission and gained a lot of data and experience by being able to perform the moon landing phase. It is important to feedback this knowledge and learning back to Mission 2 and future tasks. To this end, we are already developing both Mission 2 and Mission 3. Once again, I would like to thank all the employees who have contributed to this mission since its inception, all the families who have supported it, and all shareholders, HAKUTO-R partners, customers, suppliers, and we will continue to move forward. "

HAKUTO-R is the first attempt by a Japanese-made commercial spacecraft to land on the moon, with the goal of landing in Atlas crater on the southeastern edge of the lunar Mare Frigoris. The most eye-catching payload is a 10-kilogram lunar rover called the Rashid rover, the first lunar rover in the history of the United Arab Emirates, but also followed the failure of ispace.

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