ispace (they don't capitalize the 'i') is a Japanese company which was associated with the old Google Lunar X Prize team Hakuto, which evolved from the original White Label Space GLXP team. It raised substantial funding and carried on after the demise of GLXP. The useful part of their website is:

https://ispace-inc.com/project/

They have a multi-mission project called HAKUTO-R (R for 'reboot', a revival of the GLXP team) and the first lander is built, tested and about to be shipped to Florida for a SpaceX launch in mid-November. It carries a rover called Rashid from the UAE and contributions from Canada as well as a Japanese rover. See this press release:

https://ispace-inc.com/news/?p=2370


ispace's US subsidiary is associated with the Draper CLPS mission to Schrodinger basin, recently awarded, which will utilize a new lander from ispace larger than the Mission 1 lander.

The landing site was said to be in Lacus Somniorum north of Mare Serenitatis, but recent reports say it has moved to Atlas crater nearby - whether in or near the crater I don't know.

Launch is set for mid-November.

The spacecraft is now in Florida with a launch on or after 22 November. Lunar Flashlight, the cubesat which was not ready for launch on Artemis 1 and had to look for an alternative ride to space is apparently sharing this launch. Earlier it was said to be going with Intuitive Machines' first CLPS mission, now set to launch in March.

Phil

A press release from ispace:

https://www.ispace-inc.com/news-en/?p=3939

It gives a launch date, 28 November, and a landing site which is on the northern floor of the crater Atlas. It should have spectacular views of the massive terraced crater walls above the lander.

Phil

Launch is now scheduled for Wednesday November 30, at 08:39 UTC.
Arrival at the Moon I'm not sure, about 4 months later or so.
Thorsten

Not yet...

"SpaceX is expected to roll a Falcon 9 rocket back into its hangar at Cape Canaveral for troubleshooting, postponing the planned launch of a Japanese commercial moon lander for an unspecified period. SpaceX provided no details about the reason for grounding the rocket."

https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/11/30/space...-lander-launch/

Thorsten

Launch is scheduled at 2:38 AM Eastern on the 11th.

It just launched on its way to the moon.

https://ispace-inc.com/news-en/?p=4161

Nice images from the spacecraft and good news so far on flight operations.

Phil

In the launch video from SpaceX you can see how the landing legs unfold.
Quite cute!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaaF0IgzGSI&t=4057s

Thorsten

This mission is still in flight on its long cruise. It will soon begin to ease itself into a lunar approach orbit, and then into lunar orbit, with a landing attempt late in April. The mission team release informative press releases here:

https://ispace-inc.com/news-en

Look for some Moon images coming up during March and April.

Phil

https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1635950296395579394

Getting closer... dust off the old camera!

Phil

https://ispace-inc.com/news-en/?p=4440

Press release, only a few days (maybe up to a week) before lunar orbit insertion.

Phil

Lunar Orbit Insertion complete!
https://ispace-inc.com/news-en/?p=4460

Thorsten

Here is a nice french-language site on the landing area.

Phil

https://cnes.fr/fr/rover-rashid-une-coopera...e-de-la-science

First time I see a landing date.
They write 23 of April!
Thorsten

Thanks for the link Phil, I’ll closely follow the mission now and report eventually.
I discovered that I know Evelyn who I met back in 2019 in Zurich at the Starmus festival. You might also know her since she normally get to LPSC. I learnt that she knows Jack Schmitt and I feel that she doesn’t always share all his conclusions about Taurus Littrow
Anyway, I’m going to write her, we’ll see.
Another quite funny story this time is about Francis Rocard. Olivier invited me, back in 2014, to attempt Philae landing in Paris with the scientists and members of the government. At the same time, I was following the landing also on UNMSF and somebody, cannot remember who, came up with a solution regarding where Philae has landed. Afterwards, I ran into Francis Rocard in the underground and told him, very excited, that I knew where was the probe but… fortunately ( ) couldn’t connect my cell phone.

"First time I see a landing date.
They write 23 of April!
Thorsten "

Other sources have said 25 April. When I look at the sunrise at Atlas crater, 25 April looks more likely. I think they want to do image-based navigation and hazard avoidance, so they need to land when the Sun is a bit higher than sunrise itself. But we will see. There is also the question of whether the date is Universal time or Japan time, nearly half a day apart.

Phil

Interesting. Thanks Phil!
Thorsten

https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1640305097845481473

ispace tweets its first image of the Moon from its lander camera. It shows Langrenus crater and Mare Fecunditatis, south up as posted.

Phil

Another image, this time the far side, from the company which built the camera.

Phil

https://www.canadensys.com/canadensys-aeros...om-lunar-orbit/

https://www.spacelaunchschedule.com/space-e...-lunar-landing/

This website says the Hakuto-R mission 1 landing will be on the 29th of this month. I don't know where that comes from, but it is 4 days after sunrise, which seems a bit late to me.

Phil


(PS tip for anyone who doesn't know this - you can visualize the location of the lunar terminator on Quickmap by choosing to show the overlay 'sunlit region' and then selecting any date or time you want)

https://ispace-inc.com/news-en/?p=4577

Press release from ispace regarding landing. The first date is April 25th (16:40 UTC) in Atlas crater.

If there are delays there are three backup sites: Lacus Somniorum, Sinus Iridum and a site near the Mairan Domes not far from Chang'e 5, in northern Oceanus Procellarum. Landing dates at those locations occur as they rotate under the orbit plane, on April 26, May 1 and May 3 respectively.

Phil

https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1648860477093494784

A tweet from ispace with another image of the Moon from orbit. It shows Mare Fecunditatis, like the first image we saw. In fact, it is the first image with two additional frames added, one on each side, to make a wider view.

Phil

https://twitter.com/akaschs/status/1650226399456940033

Landing update with viewing information.

"HAKUTO-R M1 webcast starts at 11:00 a.m. EDT, Tue April 25.
Landing sequence starts at 10:40 a.m. EDT."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpR1UUnix3g

Phil

Here are some maps of the landing site and backup sites. Keep in mind that the prime site with its 8 km landing ellipse is accurate but the backup sites (which should also be 8 km across) are only approximately located here - exact locations not yet available.

Originally GLXP Team Hakuto planned its own lander, but they dropped it and chose to fly their small rover 'Sorato' on Astrobotic's GLXP mission, which was then targeted at a collapse pit or skylight in Lacus Mortis. After GLXP ended without a winner, Hakuto was 'rebooted' as HAKUTO-R (capitalized in most publications, but it is not an acronym). At first they kept the same Lacus Mortis landing site, before moving to Lacus Somniorum and then Atlas crater.


Phil

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1650506233575604227

Earthrise during the 20 April solar eclipse.

https://twitter.com/ispace_inc/status/1650408608197390336

Oblique view across Leibnitz crater, central far side. This is apparently the target of the Chang'e 6 sample return mission.

Phil

Stream on here (hopefully soon!)

Stream has started.

Deorbit burn is expected to have occurred by now. Currently behind the lunar farside and will regain contact in 30 min if nominal de-orbit burn.

Contact re-established. Just a few minutes away from landing.

They just showed a couple videos - one looking down at the surface during orbit and another looking at Earth over the lunar limb. Both taken before, rather than live.

1 km to go.

Live updates cut out at around .18 km, 54 km/h (went to simulation right after that). Now waiting for any telemetry.

We're supposed to have landed a minute or so ago, awaiting confirmation... but it's taking a while.

A number of concerned expressions in the mission control room before cutting to a commercial break.

My wife and I were watching it and you could see it coming down really fast compared to the rapidly decreasing altitude. Fingers crossed.

Landing on the Moon is hard.

Just like India and Israel, everything fine until the last minute....

I'm keeping everything crossed. The last confirmed velocity was 54km / hour, which is about 15 meters / second. How much chance there still was to get that down from the 0.18 km altitude depends on the angle of attack - but it must have all played out fast.

Some commentary on spaceflightnow.com here

Missions 2 and 3 will continue, they say. Important lessons will be learned!

Regardless, LRO will tell soon enough.

Update from mission control. The engineers look really depressed on the +25 minute status update from the Mission Controllers, and acknowledge it may be a failure. They will have at least 2 future missions, and they will use the telemetry they received until its last few seconds of flight to improve their processes.

--
Judging by the last few images of telemetry, its looking likely that it was a hard landing at higher than expected speeds.
We may not know its status until an orbiter can take an image of the landing site. I'm guessing mostly intact, but that impacting the surface at near 25 mph/40 kph was too much for the craft to function.

On the spacenews feed it mentions that, tentatively, at 90 meters the lander was dropping at 33 km/ hour. The previous numbers were 54km/hour at 180 meters altitude. OK... this is little better than reading entrail I realise, but if, for the sake of argument, we take these as more-or-less accurate the lander would have reached 0 meters with a velocity of just under 2 meters/sec.

This makes no account of whether the numbers are just vertical drop rate or overall velocity, or angle of descent. I just wanted to illustrate that they ispace team may not have been too far off the mark with their landing.

From the spacenews feed.

Great emotional moments !
The third time I watched a landing attempt on the Moon. I had watched the landing attempt of the indian probe Chandrayaan-2 and the landing attempt of the israeli probe Beresheet and each time a crash !
The deceleration of the probe at the end of the vertical descent is impressive. The error margin seems very limited for the acceptable speed at the end of the descent process.


Thanks to iSpace for the great presentation !

Seconded - well done to the team! I'm still expecting that it will be down in one piece, just a bit too hard to work as planned.

The way I understand these landings, guidance brings you a few meters above the surface with zero horizontal & vertical velocity and with the landing legs pointed down. Then you free-fall to the surface. If any of these three conditions are not met, you most likely crash. Or there was a thruster malfunction
in the last few moments when there is precious little margin for guidance to recover the situation.

Actually, I am slightly surprised by how fast the team appears to have thrown down the towel. It could be that they saw trouble in the last telemetry packets
and the loss of signal just came to confirm what they expected. Hopefully we will find out soon.

Sad news. So in the 21st Century it is China 3/3, rest of the world 0/3. Let's hope for more success later in the year.

Phil

The livestream included an animated simulation of the landing over a contour map of the landing site. Assuming it accurately represented the planned landing, it gives a target point at the black dot here:

Click to view attachment

Using low sun angle LROC NAC images, it looks like this:

Click to view attachment

Quite a rough surface (though of course the long shadows exaggerate the roughness).

I'm seeing hints from radio enthusiasts that there might have been a landing plus a bounce as if thrusters didn't cut off properly (as with Surveyor 3) or some other fault at the point of landing.

https://twitter.com/uhf_satcom/status/1650921508728975361

Phil

Sad news to see this third failure of 3 different landing technologies (including Israel and India).
Only goes to enhance one's appreciation of the Chinese landing system, which worked 3 times in a row.