Private Japanese lunar lander heads toward a touchdown in the moon's far north

 

The encore comes two years after the company’s first moonshot ended in a crash landing , giving rise to the name Resilience for its successor lander. Resilience holds a rover with a shovel to gather lunar dirt as well as a Swedish artist’s toy-size red house that will be lowered onto the moon’s dusty surface. Long the province of governments, the moon became a target of private outfits in 2019, with more flops than wins along the way. Launched in January from Florida on a long, roundabout journey, Resilience entered lunar orbit last month. It shared a SpaceX ride with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which reached the moon faster and became the first private entity to successfully land there in March. Another U.S. company, Intuitive Machines, arrived at the moon a few days after Firefly. But the tall, spindly lander face-planted in a crater near the moon’s south pole and was declared dead within hours. Resilience is targeting the top of the moon, a less forbidding place than the shadowy bottom. The ispace team chose a flat area with few boulders in Mare Frigoris or Sea of Cold, a long and narrow region full of craters and ancient lava flows that stretches across the near side’s northern tier. Once settled with power and communication flowing, the 7.5-foot (2.3-meter) Resilience will lower the piggybacking rover onto the lunar surface. Made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic with four wheels, ispace’s European-built rover — named Tenacious — sports a high-definition camera to scout out the area and a shovel to scoop up some lunar dirt for NASA.

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