Japanese company blames laser tool for its 2nd crash landing on the moon
A laser navigation tool condemned the lunar landing of a Japanese company earlier this month, which caused him to crash on the moon.
ISPACE officials announced Tuesday to Tokyo news. The landing of the accident was the second for Ispace in two years.
This time, the landing of the company called Resilience was aimed at the extreme north of the moon in Mare fridge, or sea of cold. The NASA lunar recognition orbiter relayed photos of the accident site last week when resilience and its mini rover found themselves as a wreck.
The company officials blamed the researcher’s accident in the laser range of the landing, saying that it was slow to enter into force and correctly measure the distance from the spaceship to the lunar surface. Resilience descended at a quick rate of 138 feet (42 meters) per second when the contact was lost and crashed five seconds later, they said.
The poor software caused the first Lunar Ispace to slam in the moon in 2023. Like the last test, the problem occurred during the last descent phase.
Out of seven Locoding attempts by private outfits in recent years, only one can claim total success: the hit by Firefly Aerospace of his Blue Ghost Lander in March. Blue Ghost was launched with resilience in January, sharing a SpaceX ride in Florida.
Aside from Firefly, based in Texas, only five countries have succeeded in a successful lunar landing: the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan. And only the United States put astronauts on the Moon, at the time of the Apollo program of NASA more than half a century ago.
Despite consecutive losses, Ispace is getting ahead with its third attempt to land the moon in 2027, with the cooperation of NASA, as well as a fourth planned mission. Additional tests and improvements will add up to 1.5 billion yen (more than $ 10 million) to development costs, officials said.
The CEO and founder, Takeshi Hakamada, stressed that his company “did not resign itself to the back” and sought to regain customer confidence. External experts will join the Journal des accidents, and Ispace will collaborate more closely with the Japanese space agency on technical issues.
“We firmly take the next step towards our future missions,” he said in Japanese.
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