Tokyo, April 25 (BNA) Japanese startup ispace inc (9348.T) is preparing to land its Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) spacecraft on the moon early Wednesday, in what will be the world’s first lunar landing by a spacecraft. satellite. Private company if successful.
The M1 lander is scheduled to descend around 1:40 a.m. JST (1640 GMT Tuesday) after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX rocket in December, Reuters reports.
The success would be a welcome reversal from recent setbacks in space technology for Japan, which has grand ambitions to build up a domestic industry, including a goal of sending Japanese astronauts to the moon by the late 2020s.
In one of the biggest blows, last month the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lost its new H3 medium-lift rocket to manual destruction after it reached space. It’s been less than five months since JAXA’s solid-fuel Epsilon rocket failed after launch in October.
The 2.3-meter (7.55-foot) M1 will begin an hour-long descent phase from its current location, into the lunar orbit about 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the surface moving at 6,000 km/h (3,700 mph), its chief technology officer said. Rio Ogyi at a briefing on Monday.
Augie likened the task of slowing the probe to the correct speed against the pull of the Moon’s gravity to “squeezing the brakes on a running bike on the edge of a ski jumping hill.”
Only the United States, the former Soviet Union and China have landed softly on the moon, with attempts in recent years by India and a private Israeli company ending in failure.
After reaching its landing site on the edge of Mare Frigoris, in the moon’s northern hemisphere, M1 will deploy a two-wheeled, baseball-sized rover developed by JAXA, Japanese toy maker Tomy Co (7867.T) and Sony Group (6758.T), as well as a rover “Rashid” four-wheeler in the United Arab Emirates.
M1 also carries an experimental solid state battery made by NGK Spark Plug Co (5334.T), among other things to measure how it will perform on the moon.
On its second mission scheduled for 2024, M1 will bring the rover for ispace, while from 2025, it is set to work with US space lab Draper to bring NASA payloads to the Moon, with a goal of building a permanent lunar colony by 2040.
Shares of the Tokyo-based lunar startup startup made a sharp market debut on the Tokyo Stock Exchange this month as investors bet that its lunar development and transportation business would align with Japan’s national defense policy and space development.
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