The Japanese private spaceflight company ispace aims to make history on Thursday (June 5) with its second attempt to land on the moon.
The Resilience lander is currently orbiting the moon as it prepares to land within Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”) in the northern hemisphere. The landing is scheduled for Thursday at 3:17 p.m. EDT (1917 GMT; or 4:17 a.m. Japan Standard Time on Friday, June 6), ispace announced today (June 4). This is seven minutes earlier than previously stated, after engineers fine-tuned orbital calculations.
You’ll be able to watch the landing attempt live via ispace, and Space.com will carry the company’s livestream. Should ispace decide to switch to an alternative landing site, the Resilience landing would shift to different landing dates and times, the company stated on social media.
Resilience is ispace’s second lunar lander and has been on a long, circuitous route to the moon after launch on Jan. 15 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is a follow-up to the failed Hakuto-R Mission 1 landing attempt back in 2023, and is also part of a wider surge in private lunar exploration efforts that have seen a number of recent commercial landing attempts.
A successful landing would mark Japan’s first private spacecraft to safely reach the lunar surface and only the third commercial success globally, signaling growing momentum in commercial exploration of Earth’s nearest neighbor.
Ready for descent
Resilience is currently in a circular orbit 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon. At around 2:20 p.m. EDT (1840 GMT) on Thursday, an hour before landing, it will automatically fire its main engine, reducing altitude and velocity as it begins its fully autonomous landing attempt.
Resilience, which is 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and 8.5 feet (2.6 m) wide, is targeting Mare Frigoris, a vast, relatively smooth basaltic plain in the moon’s northern hemisphere.
Resilience weighed roughly 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) when fully fueled and is based on the same Hakuto-R hardware as Mission 1, but features software updates using lessons learned from the earlier failed landing. An altitude sensor in Mission 1 mistook the rim of a crater for the lunar surface, causing the lander to shut…
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