ispace (Hakuto-R) Mission 1, Japanese private lunar mission Options

[Hungry4info]

They just showed a couple videos - one looking down at the surface during orbit and another looking at Earth over the lunar limb. Both taken before, rather than live.

[Hungry4info]

1 km to go.

[Explorer1]

Live updates cut out at around .18 km, 54 km/h (went to simulation right after that). Now waiting for any telemetry.

[Hungry4info]

We're supposed to have landed a minute or so ago, awaiting confirmation... but it's taking a while.

[Hungry4info]

A number of concerned expressions in the mission control room before cutting to a commercial break.

[Steve G]

My wife and I were watching it and you could see it coming down really fast compared to the rapidly decreasing altitude. Fingers crossed.

[tolis]

Landing on the Moon is hard.

[Explorer1]

Just like India and Israel, everything fine until the last minute....

[marsbug]

I'm keeping everything crossed. The last confirmed velocity was 54km / hour, which is about 15 meters / second. How much chance there still was to get that down from the 0.18 km altitude depends on the angle of attack - but it must have all played out fast.

[tolis]

Some commentary on spaceflightnow.com here

[Explorer1]

Missions 2 and 3 will continue, they say. Important lessons will be learned!

Regardless, LRO will tell soon enough.

[dtolman]

Update from mission control. The engineers look really depressed on the +25 minute status update from the Mission Controllers, and acknowledge it may be a failure. They will have at least 2 future missions, and they will use the telemetry they received until its last few seconds of flight to improve their processes.

--
Judging by the last few images of telemetry, its looking likely that it was a hard landing at higher than expected speeds.
We may not know its status until an orbiter can take an image of the landing site. I'm guessing mostly intact, but that impacting the surface at near 25 mph/40 kph was too much for the craft to function.

[marsbug]

On the spacenews feed it mentions that, tentatively, at 90 meters the lander was dropping at 33 km/ hour. The previous numbers were 54km/hour at 180 meters altitude. OK... this is little better than reading entrail I realise, but if, for the sake of argument, we take these as more-or-less accurate the lander would have reached 0 meters with a velocity of just under 2 meters/sec.

This makes no account of whether the numbers are just vertical drop rate or overall velocity, or angle of descent. I just wanted to illustrate that they ispace team may not have been too far off the mark with their landing.

[marsbug]

"We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," says Takeshi Hakamada, founder & CEO of ispace.

Ground teams had data from the lander during its descent, but lost the signal before landing.

"We will keep going," he said.

From the spacenews feed.

[Webscientist]

Great emotional moments !
The third time I watched a landing attempt on the Moon. I had watched the landing attempt of the indian probe Chandrayaan-2 and the landing attempt of the israeli probe Beresheet and each time a crash !
The deceleration of the probe at the end of the vertical descent is impressive. The error margin seems very limited for the acceptable speed at the end of the descent process.


Thanks to iSpace for the great presentation !

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