Japanese Spacecraft Fails In Moon Landing Attempt

The privately-owned robotic Hakuto-R lunar lander which lifted off in December 2022, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, failed to land softly on the moon's surface, as scheduled on April 25 at 1640 UTC.

The lander arrived in lunar orbit on March 20, and on Tuesday, made the move down to the surface, descending from an altitude of 62 miles after over hour-long series of maneuvers.

Tokyo-based company, ispace which operates Hakuto-R, lost touch with the lander just as it was scheduled to land softly. "So, we have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said during a webcast of the mission.

The landing site was the floor of the 54-mile-wide (87 km) Atlas Crater, which lies in the Mare Frigoris ("Sea of Cold") region of the moon's near side. Hakuto-R seemed to get itself into position well, according to telemetry provided during the webcast, but it couldn't stick the landing. The planned touchdown time came and went without any word from the lander, leading the mission team to deem the try a likely failure.

Still, Hakuto-R continued beaming data home during the landing attempt, Hakamada said, describing that as one of many milestones notched in the mission.

The company which continued trying to contact the lander, said in an update later that "it has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the moon's surface. To find the root cause of this situation, ispace engineers are currently working on a detailed analysis of the telemetry data acquired until the end of landing sequence and will clarify the details after completing the analysis."

ispace operated Team Hakuto ("White Rabbit"), in the Google Lunar X Prize from 2013 to 2018. The competition which offered $20 million to the first private outfit to land a robotic probe on the moon, expired in 2018 without a winner. But the Tokyo-based company continued developing its lander, and in December launched a test mission it called M1 which culminated in Tuesday's historic attempted landing.

Government-built probes from the Soviet Union, China and the United States remain to date, the only ones to have touched down successfully on the moon's surface.

WATCH the webcast of the Hakuto-R mission(M1).