6 June 2025 In 2016, the Japanese private company ispace announced the probable loss of its second lunar probe, Resilience, which attempted a soft landing in the Mare Frigoris area of the Moon's northern hemisphere.
As noted in the company's statement, the apparatus began its descent according to the plan, however, a premature reaching of the surface was recorded approximately on 1 a minute 45 seconds ahead of schedule with a critically high speed - approx 187 km/year, indicating a failed landing. After that, communication with the device was lost, and the mission was declared a failure.
According to the previous analysis, the cause of the incident was a malfunction of the laser range finder, which was responsible for the accurate measurement of the distance to the surface. Due to the delay in receiving the data, the system could not correctly reduce the landing speed.
Mission Resilience has been launched 15 January 2025 year on the Falcon rocket 9 along with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost, which successfully landed in March. ispace instead chose a low-energy trajectory, which involved a long journey with a gravitational maneuver near the Earth.
Resilience carried several scientific and technological payloads, in particular the Tenacious micromoon, experimental water electrolyser, food growing system and radiation detector. In addition, planned to collect samples of lunar soil for a token sale to NASA for $5000.
This is the second failed attempt by ispace to make a soft landing on the moon. The company's first device crashed in April 2023 year due to an error in the navigation software. Despite this, the company continues to implement the following missions. In particular, in 2027 Mission is planned for the year 3 in partnership with NASA within the CLPS program, as well as the Mission 4, supported by the Japanese government.
It is noted in ispace, that future missions will be based on new designs of vehicles, different from Resilience. The management of the company emphasizes, that despite the complexity of the tasks of lunar navigation, landing on the moon is not an impossible task, and lessons learned will help ensure the success of future projects.