Private Japanese spacecraft aims to land in the moon’s ‘Sea of Cold’ this week
The Japanese company ispace is poised to make a historic moon landing this week.
The company’s Reslience lunar lander will attempt to touch down in Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”), a basalt plain in the moon’s northern hemisphere, on Thursday (June 5) at 3:24 p.m. EDT (1924 GMT). You’ll be able to watch the landing attempt online via a live webcast on ispace’s YouTube page, beginning about one hour before landing.
Success would be huge for ispace and for Japan, which has just one soft lunar landing on its books to date — that of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s SLIM spacecraft, which touched down just last year. It would also be a big milestone for commercial spaceflight, which has increasingly set its sights on the moon.
Resilience is ispace’s second lunar lander. The first reached lunar orbit but failed during its touchdown try in April 2023. If Resilience succeeds on June 5, the lander will deploy a small rover called Tenacious and also operate a suite of scientific instruments on the lunar surface.
Reslience launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15 along with another private moon lander — Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which aced its touchdown on March 2.
Resilience took a much longer path to the moon. It completed a brief Earth orbit phase, a lunar flyby and deep space and lunar orbit maneuvers, all of which helped guide the spacecraft along a fuel-efficient trajectory that used gravitational forces to adjust its path.
The lander entered lunar orbit as planned on May 6. On May 28, Resilience performed an orbital control maneuver, a 10-minute engine burn that brought the spacecraft into a circular orbit around the moon about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface, according to a statement from ispace.
“Just as they always do after a major burn of the propulsion system, ispace engineers are currently hard at work analyzing the path that the 3rd orbital control maneuver put Resilience on,” ispace officials said in a May 30 post on X. “If necessary, they may make a small adjustment to optimize the lander’s direction of travel called an orbital trim maneuver.”
Prior to its latest maneuver, the spacecraft snapped a stunning photo of the lunar surface from orbit, showcasing the moon’s many craters and complex topography. Traveling at approximately 3,600 mph (5,800 kph), Resilience is racing around the moon, making a lap every two hours or so as it gears up for its landing attempt later this week.
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