Japan’s private lunar lander Hakuto-R crashed during a landing attempt in late April when an onboard altitude sensor became confused by the edge of a lunar crater.
Representatives from the Tokyo-based ISpace company, which built the rover, said the unexpected terrain caused the lander’s computer to determine that the altitude measurement was wrong and instead based it on the mission’s expected altitude. As a result, the computer was convinced that the test was less than correct, which led to The crash On April 25.
“When the lander estimates its own altitude to be zero, or on the moon, it is approximately 5 km later. [3.1 miles] above the lunar surface,” said iSpace in a statement released Friday, May 26. After reaching the scheduled landing time, the lander continued its descent at low speed. At that point, the controlled landing descent stopped, and it is believed to have free-fallen to the lunar surface.
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The company said in a briefing that insufficient consideration of the terrain around the lander contributed to the failure, in part due to a change in the landing site several months before the mission’s liftoff.
Lander, which It started in December 2022 By A SpaceX Hawk 9 The rocket, on April 26, was to land on the floor of the 54-mile-wide (87 km) Atlas Crater in the Mare Frigoris (“Cold Sea”) region. the moonIt is near. Earlier this week NASA’s Lunar Orbiter spotted the wreckage of Hakuto-R Near the intended landing place.
If successful, Hakuto-R will be the first privately operated lunar lander to perform a lunar landing. So far, only NASA, China and Russia have soft-landed spacecraft on the Moon.
The space mission successfully completed eight of the nine mission events and failed only during the final phase of the power descent. The outage will not affect the planned launch of the second and third Ispace missions in 2024 and 2025, company representatives said.
Since the error was detected as a software issue, future missions will not require a hardware redesign.
“We are now able to identify the issue during the landing and have a clear picture of how to improve our future missions,” iSpace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in a statement.
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