As it attempted to land softly on the moon, a Japanese company crashed its spacecraft Tuesday. Its five-month journey between the launchpad and the lunar surface was abruptly cut short.
The company ispace invited the entire world to join its Tokyo-based Mission Control on the 25th of April through a livestream. The landing sequence was a nail-biting one lasting about an hour. The robotic spacecraft followed automated commands and performed a braking motor burn to adjust Hakuto-R’s speed and orientation to touch down.
Mission control was in contact with the spacecraft as it descended. After the landing maneuvers, however, the team lost communication with the lander. The ispace officials were forced to accept that the landing failed in front of a room filled with visibly disgruntled engineers. Takeshi hakamada is the CEO of ispace. He said they will continue to look into the status of this lander.
He said, “At the moment, I can say that we are very proud to have achieved so many things in this Mission 1.” “We collected actual flight data in the landing phase.” This is a huge achievement for future missions.
The daring company about to try…
