“What we have accomplished so far is already a great achievement, and we are already applying lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace. With its legs extended, the lander stands 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) tall and 8.5 feet (2.6 meters) wide.
The dry mass of the spacecraft is about 750 pounds (340 kilograms). Another 10-minute engine firing April 13 steered the spacecraft into a circular 60-mile-high orbit around the moon, setting up for the landing attempt Tuesday.Ībout two-thirds of the lander’s launch mass was hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants to feed Hakuto-R’s engines. The solar-powered spacecraft was then pulled back toward the moon by gravitational forces, and then Hakuto-R performed another engine burn March 21 to be captured into lunar orbit. The Hakuto-R lander, which ispace calls its “Series 1” design, reached a distance of 855,000 miles (nearly 1.38 million miles) from Earth in February, becoming the farthest privately-funded, commercially-operated spacecraft in history. The spacecraft took a longer but more fuel efficient route to the moon than the direct trajectory followed by NASA’s Apollo missions or the Orion spacecraft in the U.S.-led Artemis program. The four-and-a-half month journey from the Florida launch base has included multiple engine firings, first to boost ispace’s Hakuto-R lander out of Earth orbit toward the moon, then to guide the spacecraft toward an intercept with the moon last month. 11 from Cape Canaveral aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The Hakuto-R lander is about the size of a compact car, with four landing legs that extended soon after a successful launch Dec. If all goes according to plan, the history-making autonomous landing is scheduled around 12:40 p.m.
DELIVER US THE MOON ACHIEVEMENT GUIDE SERIES
EDT (1540 UTC) Tuesday, when it will drop out of its 60-mile-high (100-kilometer) orbit around the moon and begin a series of propulsive maneuvers to target a landing zone inside Atlas crater, a 54-mile-high (87-kilometer) impact basin on the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon. The Hakuto-R lander will begin an hour-long descent sequence at 11:40 a.m. The Japanese company ispace could become the first commercial firm to achieve a controlled landing on the moon Tuesday, when its privately-funded unpiloted Hakuto-R lander attempts to touch down inside a crater to deliver a small Emirati rover and other research payloads to the lunar surface. The Hakuto-R lunar lander captured this view of Earthrise from an altitude of about 60 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface.
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