A Private Japanese Lunar is now in orbit around the Moon.
The spacecraft of resilience, which was built by the company based in Tokyo, Ispace, arrived at the moon on Tuesday (May 6), keeping it in the target for a historic touchdown that tries within a month.
“First, we are extremely pleased that the successful resilience has reached lunar orbit as planned today,” said Hakamada, founder and CEO of ISPACE, in a statement. “We will continue to process with careful operations and exhaustive preparations to guarantee the success of lunar landing.”
Resilience was launched on January 15 on a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket along with another private wool-Azul Lander-Azul, built and operated by the Firefly Aerospace company based in Texas.
Blue Ghost Tok a more direct route to the moon, reaching the lunar orbit on February 13 and playing the closest neighbor on Earth on March 2. That was a historical moment; Blue Ghost became the second private spacecraft on the soft earth on the moon, after the Odyssey crafts of intuitive machines in February 2024.
Resilience, on the contrary, Tiempo Toky, taking a road of low energy and fuel conservation that presented a nearby lunar overflow on February 14.
If everything agrees with the plan, resilience will be reduced on June 5 within the Frigoris mare (“sea of cold”), a basaltic plain in the northern hemisphere of the moon. A successful landing would be the second for Japan, whose national space agency put a spacecraft called Slim (“Lander Smart to investigate the moon”) in January 2024.
Resilience carries five useful charges of science and technology. One of them is a miniature rover called Tenacious, which was built by the subsidiary based in Luxembourg of Isspace.
Tenacious will collect a lunar land under a contract with NASA. And the Little Rover has a payload: “Moonhouse”, a project by the artist Mikael Genberg, which is located in the front bumper of Tenacious.
The June 5 landing attempt will be the second for ISPACE, whose objective is to help open the moon for greater exploration and exploitation of resources. The company’s first Lander of the company reached the orbit successfully in March 2023, but failed during its TouchDown attempt in April.
