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This topic is offered for NewMars members who might wish to contribute links, images or text about the Japanese lunar lander Resilience.
The topic opens with announcement the probe has arrived at the Moon after a long flight, and will attempt a landing Thursday 2025/06/05.
A Japan-based company will attempt to land on the moon. Here’s why its lander spent months, not days, in space
Japan-based company Ispace will attempt to safely land its Resilience spacecraft on the moon this week after the lunar lander spent months in orbit.By Jackie Wattles, CNN
Published Jun 4, 2025 6:14 PM EDT | Updated Jun 4, 2025 6:14 PM EDT
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https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/ja … -on-june-5
Japanese company ispace will attempt historic moon landing today
News
By Andrew Jones published 23 hours ago
The private ispace Resilience lander is ready for a moon landing attempt at 3:17 p.m. ET on Thursday (June 5).
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More from the space.com article:
Post-landing plans
Resilience is attempting to make more than a statement with its landing. The solar-powered lander carries five science payloads, including a micro moon rover named Tenacious, which was developed by ispace's Luxembourg-based subsidiary, and carries payloads for commercial partners.Tenacious sports a high-definition, forward-mounted camera and a small shovel for collecting samples. Resilience is also packing a water electrolyzer experiment, an algae-based food production module, and a deep space radiation probe from Taiwan that could contribute to future crewed mission safety.
Also aboard are a commemorative alloy plate based on the "Charter of the Universal Century," a fictional document from the popular Japanese science fiction franchise Gundam; a UNESCO memory disk preserving linguistic and cultural diversity; and a "Moonhouse" artwork aboard Tenacious.
If Resilience lands successfully, it is expected to operate for up to two weeks (one lunar day) on the moon's surface before succumbing to the deep cold of lunar night. The European Space Agency's ESTRACK ground network will support communication between the lander and ispace's Mission Control Center in Tokyo.
Related stories:
— What's flying to the moon on ispace's Resilience lunar lander?— Japan's Resilience moon lander spots Point Nemo, Earth's remote spacecraft graveyard, from orbit (photo)
— Japan's Resilience moon lander aces lunar flyby ahead of historic touchdown try (photo)
The mission is also part of a grander ispace vision. The pioneering company is focused on developing robotic landers and lunar rovers with the overarching goal of expanding humanity's presence beyond Earth and building a sustainable cislunar economy.
The company was established as White Label Space in 2010 by Hakamada, before changing its name to ispace in 2013. The company competed in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, and though it did not undertake a lunar mission, it continued its lander work after the X Prize's 2018 end. Headquartered in Tokyo, ispace also operates offices in the United States and Luxembourg.
Resilience is the latest in a flurry of lunar landing activity. Since ispace's first landing attempt in 2023, India's Chandrayaan-3 has successfully touched down, Japan's SLIM lander made a successful yet lopsided landing, China's Chang'e 6 collected the first samples from the far side of the moon, and Russia's Luna 25 crashed into the moon.
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This post is about the unknown results of Resilience landing attempt...
url here>> https://www.yahoo.com/news/private-luna … 57487.html
CBS News
Private lunar lander descends to surface of the moon, fate unknown
William Harwood
Thu, June 5, 2025 at 3:45 PM EDT
4 min readA privately-built Japanese moon lander made its descent to touchdown on the lunar surface Thursday, but has so far failed to send a signal back to Earth as controllers anxiously awaited data to confirm if the landing was a success. The latest mission comes two years after the company's first lander ran out of gas and crashed to the lunar surface.
The Resilience lander, carrying cameras, a few scientific instruments and a tiny rover, was scheduled to drop out of a 62-mile-high orbit and touch down at 3:17 p.m. EDT near the center of Mare Frigoris — the Sea of Cold — in the moon's northern hemisphere at 60 degrees north latitude.
The company ended its livestream coverage of the landing about 15 minutes later, saying team members were continuing their attempts to communicate with the lander.
This image provided by ispace, inc. shows the Resilience lander circling the moon on June 4, 2025. / Credit: ispace, inc. via AP
This image provided by ispace, inc. shows the Resilience lander circling the moon on June 4, 2025. / Credit: ispace, inc. via AP"For Mission 2, our second attempt at landing on the moon, we will not only land the Resilience lander, but we will also use a mechanism to deploy the Tenacious rover, which we developed in house, to explore the lunar surface," Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, the lander's builder, said on the company's web page.
Advertisement"Tenacious will explore the lunar surface, deploy a customer payload and collect regolith. Resilience will continue to operate the customer payloads on board and transmit valuable telemetry data to our mission control center."
The customer payload is a tiny model of a Swedish house, designed by artist Mikael Genberg. The traditionally styled red-and-white house measures just 4.7 inches long and 4 inches high and weighs just 3.5 ounces.
A rendering of the Tenacious micro rover carrying the the tiny
A rendering of the Tenacious micro rover carrying the the tinyAsked why he took on the project, which required years of planning, fund-raising and engineering, Genberg said "we have done as human beings things from time to time that (do not) seemingly have a purpose beyond just being creative."
"The Eiffel Tower, for instance, I mean it's a stupid thing to build," he said. "Today, it has a purpose as maybe the most important thing to make Paris the most visited city in the world."
AdvertisementWhile the "moonhouse" could survive for thousands if not millions of years in the airless environment of the moon, its custom paint will fade in the sun's harsh radiation and lunar dust will slowly coat its surface. Genberg joked that he would happily await an invitation to repaint it.
The house would be dropped from the rover a few days after landing, and the team hopes to capture photos with Earth in the background. The cost of the project was not disclosed, but a spokesman said it was similar to what one might pay for a relatively large house on Earth.
A notional view of ispace's Resilience lander and the microrover Tenacious it is carrying to the moon. / Credit: ispace
A notional view of ispace's Resilience lander and the microrover Tenacious it is carrying to the moon. / Credit: ispaceispace is one of a handful of companies attempting to provide non-government transportation services to the moon for a variety of payloads ranging from science instruments to technology demonstrations.
But as it turns out, getting low-cost spacecraft to the moon's surface is extremely difficult.
Advertisementispace tried and failed in 2023 when its first lander ran out of propellant nearing the surface, dropping to a "hard" crash landing. Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic Technology launched its Peregrine lander in January 2024, but the spacecraft suffered a propulsion system leak and never made it to the moon.
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The Cool DownHouston-based Intuitive Machines successfully put two landers down on the lunar surface in 2024 and again earlier this year, but both spacecraft tipped over on touchdown. While each one survived its landing, neither was able to accomplish all of its pre-flight objectives.
Before Thursday, only one company, Austin-based Firefly Aerospace, had successfully touched down and carried out its mission, landing the Blue Ghost spacecraft on March 2, 53 years after the final Apollo mission.
Resilience and Blue Ghost were launched atop a single SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15. The Blue Ghost lander took a direct route to the moon and carried out a successful touchdown, operating for a full two-week lunar "day."
AdvertisementResilience followed a longer, low-energy trajectory that carried it well past its target, using the moon's gravity to bring it back to an initially elliptical orbit and finally, using its thrusters, to the 100-kilometer (62-mile) circular orbit that set the stage for descent.
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Reports today (6-6-2025) indicate they have pretty much determined that it hit the surface still moving far too fast. But no word as to why.
So for ispace, that's two very similar impacts moving too fast. There might be a pattern there, but there might not be. Nobody knows.
For Intuitive Machines, both of the tall, spindly landers fell over. Tall and spindly is the wrong thing to do, landing on rough ground, especially soft rough ground, something known since the early 1960's. I'm surprised they did not know that at the outset of their design.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost made it down OK. It is much closer to the "short and squat" design approach that long experience says works.
Think there may be a lesson here to re-learn?
And there's another lesson regarding decelerating to safe speeds before you run completely out of altitude. That increases the landing burn dV, but it is apparently necessary. If the surface is rougher than you planned on, your altitude reading from radar is going to be erratic: you literally do not know how close to the surface you are.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2025-06-06 07:58:05)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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As a follow up to GW's report in Post #5, here is a snippet from Space.com...
Preliminary data based on telemetry from Resilience's final moments suggest that the lander's laser rangefinder experienced some sort of delays while measuring the probe's distance to the lunar surface.
"As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing," ispace officials wrote in an update. "Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface."
A hard landing means Resilience hit the moon's surface faster than planned. It's unlikely it survived in any condition to proceed with its two-week mission, or deploy the small Tenacious rover built by the European Space Agency.
I had asked Google what sensors were in use for Resilience landing. I'd expected radar but figured a laser sensor might be a possibility since laser sensors are now in common use in automobiles.
In Apollo, humans used eyeball vision sensors to supplement the microwave radar available at the time.
My recollection is that the Soviet's had a vision oriented landing system planned. That system required the pilot to watch the approaching surface through a device like a set of binoculars, and when the focus matched the value they were trained for, they would be on the surface. As far as I know that system never saw action.
This line of thought leads me to wonder if modern AI based vision systems might be able to perform similar depth perception to supplement other sensor readings.
Finally, it occurred to me that it might be possible to drop a small package of instruments to the surface ahead of the lander. This would be a package designed to withstand shock, and able to broadcast location data after impact. The lander could then use that data to supplement whatever else it is taking in.
Could this probe be used as a homing beacon for the next probe?
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As an update to what I put in post 5 above, and what Tom put in post 6 above, the same applies to laser range finders as to radar rangefinders. If the surface is rough, you get conflicting signals, leading to enormous uncertainty in your estimated altitude. That is inherent!
Now, if you decelerate to zero vertical (and horizontal) speed at something like 100 m up, you can slowly descend to the surface at just about thrust/weight = 1. That makes the landing burn and its dV longer and larger. Inherent. But you have a chance to set down, if the boulders aren't too big, and your vehicle is not too tall and spindly.
If on the other hand you are planning your descent to decelerate to zero speed just as you reach the surface (to save on landing burn dV), you are screwed landing in rough field conditions, because of the surface-roughness-induced uncertainty in your altitude, NO MATTER HOW MEASURED!
Apollo-11 proved that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, way the hell back in 1969. The computer was going to crash them among house-sized boulders, too big even for the short, squat LM design, just because it was ignorant of what was in front of it (not even radar, just accelerometers). Armstrong and Aldrin had to take manual control, stop and hover at a few dozen meters altitude, and then hover-fly out of that boulder field. They touched down with a single handful of seconds of propellant left. They actually needed an even bigger dV!!!
So why is it that nobody seems to actually learn from demonstrated history? THAT I cannot understand!
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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