Japanese company’s spacecraft likely crashed during Moon landing attempt

A Japanese company has lost contact with a small robotic spacecraft it was sending to the moon. Analysis of data from the vehicle suggests it ran out of propellant during its final approach and instead of landing softly crashed into the lunar surface.

After firing its main engine, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander built by Ispace of Japan dropped out of lunar orbit. About an hour later, at 12:40 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, the lander, about 7 1/2 feet tall, was expected to land in Atlas Crater, a 54-mile-wide feature in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.

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But after the time of touchdown, no signal was received from the spacecraft. On a live video streamed by the company, a pall of silence enveloped the control room in Tokyo where Ispace engineers looked with concerned expressions at their screens.

In a statement released Wednesday morning in Japan, the company reported that Ispace engineers observed that the estimated remaining propellant was “at the lower threshold and shortly afterward the descent speed rapidly increased.”

In other words, the spacecraft ran out of fuel and fell.

Communications with the spacecraft were then lost. “Based on this, it has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the moon’s surface,” the company said.

An investigation will now have to determine why the spacecraft apparently misjudged its altitude. The analysis suggests that it was still high up when it should have been on the ground.

The Hakuto-R spacecraft launched in December and took a circuitous but energy-efficient path to the moon, entering lunar orbit in March. For the past month, engineers had been checking out the lander’s systems before proceeding with the landing attempt.

The Ispace lander could have been the first step toward a new paradigm of space exploration, with governments, research institutions and companies sending scientific experiments and other cargo to the moon.

The beginning of that lunar transport transition will now have to wait for other companies later this year. Two commercial landers, built by US companies and financed by NASA, are scheduled to be launched in the coming months.

Ispace is planning a second mission using a lander of almost the same design next year.