Japanese startup ispace is preparing to land its Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) spacecraft on the Moon today, in what will be the world’s first lunar landing by a private company if successful.
The M1 lander is set to touch down around 5.40pm BST on Tuesday in the Moon’s Altlas Crater, located at the outer edge of Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold.
The lander took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX rocket in December.
The 2.3m tall M1 lander, which has been in lunar orbit since March 21, will begin an hour-long landing phase from its current position around 62miles above the surface, moving at more than 3,700mph, chief technology officer Ryo Ujiie told a media briefing on Monday.
Ujiie likened the task of slowing down the lander to the correct speed against the Moon’s gravitational pull to ‘stepping on the brakes on a running bicycle at the edge of a ski jumping hill’.
Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have soft-landed a spacecraft on the Moon, with attempts in recent years by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.
How to watch tonight’s lunar landing
ispace will attempt to land its payload on Tuesday, April 25, at 5.40pm BST.
A livestream will begin at 4.20pm this evening on ispace’s YouTube channel, so viewers can follow its progress.
In unsuccessful today, alternative landing dates have been set for April 26, May 1 and May 3, depending on the operational status of the mission.
Different landing sites have also been proposed by ispace, with the primary target being the Atlas Crater.
After reaching the landing site at the edge of Mare Frigoris, in the Moon’s northern hemisphere, the M1 is to deploy a two-wheeled, baseball-sized rover developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Japanese toymaker Tomy and Sony, as well as the United Arab Emirates’ four-wheeled ‘Rashid’ Rover.
The M1 is also carrying an experimental solid-state battery made by NGK Spark Plug among other objects to gauge how they perform on the Moon.
In its second mission, scheduled for 2024, the M1 will bring ispace’s own rover, while from 2025 it is set to work with US space lab Draper to take Nasa payloads to the Moon, aiming to build a permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040.
In March, JAXA lost its new medium-lift H3 rocket to forced manual destruction after it reached space, less than five months after its solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch in October.
A successful landing today would help further Japan’s goal of sending Japanese astronauts to the moon by the late 2020s.
MORE : Scientists have found a water ‘reservoir’ on the moon
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