How Resilience & Firefly Landed on the Moon: The Spacecraft’s First Moonshot and Thermonuclear Mission

The Tokyo-based company ispace declared the mission a failure several hours after communication was lost with the lander. Flight controllers scrambled to gain contact, but were met with only silence and said they were concluding the mission.

Communications ceased less than two minutes before the spacecraft’s scheduled landing on the moon with a mini rover. Until then, the descent from lunar orbit seemed to be going well.

The company’s first moonshot ended with a crash landing two years ago, and the name “Resilience” was given to the successor lander. Resilience carried a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist’s toy-size red house for placement on the moon’s dusty surface.

“This is the second time that we were not able to land. Hakamada told reporters that they have to take it very seriously. He stressed that the company would press ahead with more lunar missions.

The landings are difficult. When M1 crashed, Ryo Ujiie, ispace’s chief technology officer said the telemetry — which collects data on the craft’s altitude and speed — estimated that M1 was on the surface when it wasn’t, causing the lander to free fall.

Another U.S. company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. The landers was put down in a crater near the moon’s south pole and was declared dead within hours.

The top of the moon is not as dangerous as the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side’s northern tier.

The plan was to have the Resilience beam back pictures within an hour and to lower the rover onto the lunar surface.

Made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace’s European-built rover — named Tenacious — sported a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for NASA.

The rover was going to stick closest to the lander at a speed of less than a couple centimeters per second. It could go up to twothirds of a mile away from the lander, and should be up and running during the two week mission.

A little red cottage and a green door dubbed the Moonhouse was held by the rover for place on the lunar surface.

iSpace Mission 2: Successful Robotic Landing of a U.S. Lunar Landing Rover and a Deep Space Probe

Minutes before the attempted landing, Hakamada assured everyone that ispace had learned from its first failed mission. “Engineers did everything they possibly could” to ensure success this time, he said.

Ispace, like other businesses, does not have “infinite funds” and cannot afford repeated failures, Jeremy Fix, chief engineer for ispace’s U.S. subsidiary, said at a conference last month.

Two more U.S. companies are aiming for moon landings by year’s end: Blue Origin and Astrobotic Technology. The first Astrobotic’s lunar lander missed the moon altogether and crashed into Earth’s atmosphere.

For a long time, governments competed to get to the moon. Only five countries have pulled off successful robotic lunar landings: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. The U.S. is the only nation to have had people on the moon.

The landing sequence of the HAKUTO-R Mission 2 began from a 100 kilo altitude at 3 am local time on 5 June. The craft was supposed to land in the Mare Frigoris at 4.17am.

M2 didn’t receive measurements of the distance between itself and the lunar surface in time to slow down and reach its correct landing speed, the team said.

If M2 had successfully landed on the lunar surface, the mission would have been the second time a commercial company had achieved the feat and a first for a non-US company. ispace’s Mission 1 (M1) probably crashed during a landing attempt in April 2023.

Ujiie told Nature that the company altered its software to address the M2 issue. “We also carefully selected how to approach the landing site,” he added.

Had M2 landed successfully, the craft would have supplied electricity for its cargo, including water electrolyzing equipment and a module for food production experiments — developed by Japan-based Takasago Thermal Engineering and biotechnology firm Euglena. A deep space radiation probe made by Taiwan’s National Central University, and the 54-centimetre Tenacious rover were also be on board. The rover, created by ispace’s European subsidiary in Luxemburg, was going to be released from the lander to collect imagery, location data and lunar sand known as regolith. The small red house made by the Swedish artist is a part of Tenacious.