posted 01-07-2025 09:37 AM               

Please use this topic to discuss ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 2 to the moon to deliver the company's RESILIENCE Lander and Micro Rover to the surface of the moon

posted 05-16-2025 04:31 PM               

Hello from lunar orbit!

• RESILIENCE status: nominal

• Distance above the Lunar surface: between ca. 100 km to 2,300 km

• Current orbital phase: Lunar orbiting phase, osculating between ca. 3,200 km/h to 6,800 km/h

This photo was taken with the spot camera mounted on top of the lander, making the cover that protects the TENACIOUS micro rover visible in the bottom right of the image.

Landing is slated for June 5, 2025 at 19:24 UTC // 15:24 EDT, so stay tuned for updates!

posted 05-16-2025 04:33 PM               

NASA's LRO Views Japan's RESILENCE Lunar Lander Landing Area

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) imaged the landing area of the ispace SMBC x HAKUTO-R Venture Moon Mission 2 RESILIENCE lunar lander which is slated to land on the surface of the Moon no earlier than June 5, 2025 (UTC).

This view of the primary landing area is 3.13 miles (5,040 meters) wide and north is up. The site is in Mare Frigoris, a volcanic region interspersed with large-scale faults known as wrinkle ridges. Mare Frigoris formed over 3.5 billion years ago as massive basalt eruptions flooded low-lying terrain.

posted 06-03-2025 09:58 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
...targeting a touchdown on June 5 at 3:24 p.m. EDT (1924 GMT).

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posted 06-05-2025 12:56 PM               

ispace SMBC x Hakuto-R Venture Moon: Live Landing Coverage

posted 06-05-2025 04:17 PM               

At this moment, we have not yet been able to establish communication with RESILIENCE, but ispace engineers in our Mission Control Center are continuing to work to contact the lander.

We will share an update with the latest information in a media announcement in the next few hours. Thank you for your patience.

posted 06-06-2025 08:08 AM               

Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Center has been able to confirm the following: 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 circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.

posted 06-06-2025 09:39 AM               

I really fail to see the reason behind your repetition that the moon is different. It isn't. The physics on Earth are the same as those in Heaven.

posted 06-08-2025 08:36 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Headshot:
Now Report the results back here and THEN we can have an intelligent discussion.

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The failures we were discussing were concerned with laser rangefinding equipment, not the process itself. If the vehicles had crashed due to radar then we would be discussing that, but they weren't.

If your premise is that radar is better than laser rangefinding, then I'm gobsmacked.

Radar was an antecedent technology to laser, which is why it was used in earlier space programs. Laser is more powerful, more directive, smaller, and less energy consumptive per unit (a bit like the difference which explains why Blu-ray discs are preferred to vinyl records today).

You only have to look at the Chinese Rino.ai and Pony.ai experimental autonomous driverless heavy goods trucks that operate between Beijing and Tianjin port to notice both the absence of large, unwieldy, obtrusive radar equipment and the small, almost tiny laser rangefinding module which is installed.

It's also common sense from a physics point of view that you should use light not radio as radio waves operate in the gigahertz (GHz) range while lasers operate in the terahertz (THz) range, which gives much higher data rates and more information being encoded per second by laser than radar.