Resilience is a lunar lander craft from Japanese company, ispace, which launched on a Falcon 9 earlier this year.
Scheduled to land at 19:17 GMT at the Mare Frigoris region on the near side of the moon, the craft appeared to land 45 seconds before the scheduled landing time, with a 187 kilometers per hour speed (much too fast for a safe landing). Telemetry was lost on the live webcast and the company ended the stream 25 minutes later with no updates on the lander status.
The company issued a statement several hours after the scheduled landing, acknowledging that Resilience was likely lost. In their statement, ispace stated "The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstanes, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface."
ispace continued that "our top priority is to swiftly analyse the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause"
This problem appears to be a different one to that leading to the failure of the first lander, which was of similar design and crashed in April 2023.
Resilience was due to undertake a range of scientific instruments along with Tenacious, a five-kilogram rover developed by ispace's European subsidiary. Two further missions are planned in 2027.
Keywords: Space Mission Resilience Spacecraft ispace Moon Japan