A private Japanese space company will try to land an uncrewed robotic spacecraft on the moon and deliver a rover to its surface today, after a failed attempt in April 2023.
Landing on the moon remains onerous — demonstrated by numerous flopped landings. Though Firefly Aerospace succeeded in landing in March, another U.S. company, Intuitive Machines, didn’t fare as well, ending up on its side in a crater less than a week later.
Tokyo company ispace has been waiting for this day for the so-called Hakuto-R mission for roughly 4.5 months. Its spacecraft, Resilience, was one of two spacecraft headed to the moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in mid-January. Its travel companion, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, took a faster route and touched down on the surface March 2. Though Firefly wasn’t the trailblazer — the first private robotic lander to make the journey to the surface happened last year — it was the first to get its lander there upright and in one piece.
But ispace’s lander has taken a longer journey to save on fuel — and the company knows all too well how crucial that is: After a post-flight investigation, the company said its first lander crashed because it ran out of fuel on the way down, unable to control its landing.
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Here’s how to watch the second-chance event.
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The Hakuto-R mission is gearing up for a landing near the center of Mare Frigoris, aka the Sea of Cold, at 3:17 p.m. ET on Thursday, June 5 (that’s 4:24 a.m. on June 6 in Japan).
Livestream coverage will begin about one hour earlier, at 2:10 p.m. ET, with English translation.
The public can also watch on X, the social platform owned by SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Or you can bookmark this story and come back here to watch the broadcast below:
Landing on the moon is difficult because of its exosphere, which provides virtually no drag to slow a spacecraft down as it approaches the ground. What’s more, there are no GPS systems on the moon to help guide a craft to its landing spot. Engineers have to compensate for those challenges from 239,000 miles away.
