'Hard landing' of moon mission

The Japanese-made lander took off for the Moon on a SpaceX rocket late last year. A Moon-landing mission spearheaded by a Tokyo-based tech firm appears to have been unsuccessful, with the company saying its unmanned craft likely made a “hard landing” on the lunar surface after a total loss of communication. The Japanese company, ispace, hoped to make history with the first commercial Moon landing on Tuesday, but the robotic Hakuto-R lander stopped transmitting data shortly after the scheduled touchdown time and has not been in contact with mission control since. The company offered a lengthy update on the status of the mission, saying there is a “high probability” that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the Moon’s surface. It noted that its engineers would produce a “detailed analysis” of the data acquired before the landing sequence to better understand what went wrong.

The new data would be used for a second Moon mission planned for 2024. The attempted landing on the Moon was a multinational project, with ispace working with Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch its Hakuto-R lander atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The craft took three months to enter lunar orbit, taking 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth at its furthest point. ispace plans to deploy at least one lunar rover for surface exploration and data collection, and another attempt scheduled for 2025 will be made alongside NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. To date, only the government space agencies of the US, the former Soviet Union, and China have successfully touched down on the Moon.