https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5Xf7POM3qQ
This link is for a press conference on ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 2 - starting at 8 p m Eastern time, 5 pm Pacific time for North America.
Phil
Just a few notes. Mission 2 will fly in the 4th quarter of 2024 (no earlier than...). The lander will be named Resilience (M1 lander didn't get a name). It will carry an ispace-designed rover which will scoop up a bit of regolith, and NASA will buy it for a nominal amount to demonstrate transfer of ownership of lunar material, a legal precedent for future commercial activity. There are several other payloads testing technology and performing a small biological experiment. No landing site was identified but the lander has solar cells on its vertical sides and the rover has a vertical solar panel, the whole setup resembling Chandrayaan 3. That suggests a near-polar site. In fact there have been ispace studies about a site NW of Amundsen and just south of Svedberg at 82.04° S, 66.36° E:
Calzada Diaz, A., D. Bolan, D. and Puntar, M., 2020. Mission planning for a lunar polar mission: ispace's Polar Ice Explorer. Presented at the 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Abstract no. 2175.
Gscheidle, C., Biswas, J., Ivanov, D., Fernandes, D., Calzada-Diaz, A., Lamamy, J.A., Tattusch, T. and Bergemann, C., 2022. Challenges of operating a drilling instrument on a small rover at the lunar poles - LVS-PIE phase A study results. Planetary and Space Science, p.105426. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2022.105426
Those studies are for a more capable future system, not this specific mission, but they show that a near-polar site has been discussed.
Phil
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