Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark Japanese firm ispace’s latest attempt to land a craft on the Moon appears to have failed, after its Hakuto-R lander, dubbed Reliance, went dark while approaching the lunar surface. In a livestreamed event, ispace showed telemetry detailing the probe’s speed and altitude on its landing run towards the Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold …
At a somber press conference ispace officials said it's technically possible that the lander made it to the surface intact, but as the company cannot communicate with the it considers the mission a failure.
Or, in tech-bro speak, a resounding success.
Leave it to the Japanese to teach the rest of how to deal honestly with a failure.
I personally wish them success in their next try, should there be one.
Just for their plain honesty, they deserve it.
"telemetry stopped reporting speed but did deliver an altitude of negative 233 meters (732 feet), which is clearly a glitch"
I like to think it was functioning perfectly as it plunged into the green cheese, the fault with the altitude system was that it wasn't calibrated against a surface composed of dairy comestibles. Presumably fondue all over the frigid mare.
Seems surprisingly difficult to construct and autonomous landing vehicle for the Moon (one that actually lands on, rather than under the surface, and doesn't then topple over.) What chance FSD?
If it were a US company I would suspect they had mixed mixed their feet and metres.
> A common theme in all the recent failed lunar landings is: "Probe failed to see the ground"
Disclaimer: I'm not an engineer so feel free to politely tell me the flaws in this idea but...
Many years ago, someone once told me that cockroaches run at full speed and when their antennae touch an obstacle their reactions are so fast they can stop before crashing into it.
So, in a similar vein, a lunar lander could dangle a 20/50/100/whatever metre rope with a sensor at the bottom. When the sensor hits the surface the lander goes into a pre-programmed descent pattern knowing its exact altitude. Of course, the sensor may get damaged destroyed in the impact so you ignore it after the initial contact and perhaps have a second a bit further up which can confirm rate of descent and possibly lateral velocity.
It won't help if you're about to land on a steep side of a crater but it could help where the surface is featureless.
Lupine Attraction by Zoological Emission of Rodents?
I can only assume that this advanced, and probably quite environmentally sustainable (except for the mice), technology failed because there weren’t enough wolves in the vicinity, that they weren’t interested in murine prey or that the mice didn’t run quickly enough to overcome latency issues.
They should have stuck to more traditional range finding devices. Perhaps ones based on amplified light, generated perhaps by stimulated radiation emission. An ALSRE does sound a bit like something you’d get in your stomach under stressful conditions though - so perhaps the acronym could do with some work.
/pendant mode
I know that Americans have a tendency to spell things with a Z when an S is required, but you really cannot murder the word laser in the same way.
Laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation and therefore spelling the word with a Z just makes you look stupid.
Furthermore, "importanter" is NOT a word. If you meant "more important" then write that.
> light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
(although that usage turns up more in Earth-based documentaries than in serious descriptions of life on The Moon).
[1] alternatively, the Reg Reader yclept "Sampler" hails from Zuummaaaahzet, but that just seems like clutching at straws (if not sucking on a straw).
Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. Because space is hard and you can't fix things virtually. There is no app for that,
So, two lasers and if that fails, your on board system does the maths from reliable data, extrapolates and guesses what to do next.
The design of these things might need to be improved too. Crumple zones are not just for cars. The internal unit needs to be protected like a foetus in an egg. Once it lands/crashes, it hatches. Whatever way up it is, it can right itself. Stop thinking like a 50s movie. Sometimes it will crash. It should still have a chance of working. It doesn't have to look pretty. It just has to work.
> So, two lasers and if that fails, your on board system does the maths from reliable data, extrapolates and guesses what to do next.
Two lasers or at least a second altitude sensor, radar maybe? Something to increase your odds of getting data. And plan for dust getting kicked up.
And yes, have an on board computer plotting what it's supposed to be doing, and ready to take over quickly if the the data looks corrupt. Then it takes it's best guess of bringing it in safely.
> Crumple zones are not just for cars.
Or do it like they did on some of the Mars landings. Cover it with bouncy balls. ;-) You do have to make a ball that can handle the temperature extremes. So maybe you would need to use springs. Wait, temperature extremes problem again...
There wasn’t any actual purpose for going to the moon anyway, it makes no difference. It’s like going to climb a mountain, people are always laying down their Utilitarian trip on you: what for the climb?
True climbers never have any actual purpose, so long ago they learned to respond: “because it’s there, daddy-o”
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you a bit.
We are currently on a single planet with 8,2 billion people and growing. Resources are getting tighter, problems are building up.
The moon is less than a week away, and if we can get the technologies to prove that we can set up bases on the Moon, then frankly there's almost nowhere in the Solar System that will worry us, when it comes to setting up ventures further afield.
Cost effective extraction of resources out there, would relieve a large portion of the resource problems here on Earth. So anything that moves us further in this direction, is worthwhile in the long term...
" if we can get the technologies to prove that we can set up bases on the Moon, then frankly there's almost nowhere in the Solar System that will worry us, when it comes to setting up ventures further afield."
No.
I think you'll find the Moon has an impressively benign environment compared to all of the rest of the solar system, excepting Earth. Relative to exploring other locales of the Solar system, setting up bases on the Moon is akin to going camping in our own back gardens
Was it Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo, published in 1947? The Nazi ship on The Moon in that book is called <a href="https://concord.fandom.com/wiki/Wotan>Wotan</a>.
Neither. It's a flex. It's the new 1,000 push-ups per day.
Also, possibly an obscure TikTok challenge.
Once they succeed they will presumably move on to competing for the most grotesque facial plastic surgery on the moon, weeping video about how they failed to correctly install the oh-my-god-SO-CUTE helmet on their exotic dog's ev suit replete with hi-def images of it's desicated body, and how to make grilled cheese sandwiches with a 960 megawatt mining laser and/or an escape thruster.
For the clicks (though "clicks" will be mispronounced as "science").
(Mine's the one stuck in the airlock door.)
Their first mission failed when the landing trajectory passed over a cliff and the altitude reading suddenly increased a lot. The onboard computer decided it must be broken and so ignored it, resulting in the lander coming to a perfect hover with the minor flaw that it was still 5km above the ground...
So the first one has a major software issue with the altimeter seeing the edge of a crater, when the mission is to land IN A CRATER.
C'mon, people. WTAF.
This one has an issue with "slow updates" from the altimeter.
This is all stuff that would be obvious if they ran the hardware through a well-simulated mission scenario.
I don't see how a laser altimeter has "slow updates" - in my experience, it returns a reading every time it fires the laser, or it doesn't. There's no "slow" about it.
So is it the case that the Lunar soil does not reflect laser light well, and they weren't getting readings?
Do they not correlate the readings with the estimated trajectory? Why the hell don't they have a microwave radar backup? You can get those in something the size of a cigarette pack. Hell, my motorcycle has one, so it's not a size/power issue.
Are they having budget problems? Management problems? Cultural problems? Spaceflight Now had an interview with the American astronaut guy, and I got the strong feeling he's had to deal with a lot of bullshit and he's tired of it.
" so it's not a size/power issue"
I would have thought that given a likely very tight mass budget there's a lot of components and systems that would be single points of failure? And if they doubled or trebled them all up then presumable costs go up exponentially with the mass increase?
In any case, probably should have a failsafe when the lander doesn't know how high it is, like perhaps a second rangefinder. Yes, yes, weight and all, but to save a few pounds on a pair of redundant rangefinders, this probe is likely a bug splat on the moon making 100 percent of the weight useless.
Still, they made it there, which is certainly more than I'll ever be able to say.
ISTR that several of the recent failed landings involved trouble with laser rangefinders. I wonder if they're underestimating the amount of dust kicked up in low gravity by the descent rocket's exhaust plume, or its optical properties? That could certainly interfere with a time-of-flight range measurement.
Seems too obvious to overlook, but who knows.
With no atmosphere any dust kicked up will fall straight back down, it won't necessarily form clouds as it does in atmosphere. I'm not saying that I disagree with your theory, but it's not as simple a case as it would be on Earth.
Similar issue, different outcome (1969 vs 2025).
Coders back then did everything in machine language and had multiple fail-safe fallbacks. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out the ispace thing was 90% coded in Python or something by A.I. agents.
Here’s your A.I. landing agent:
https://youtu.be/7fej5XgfBYQ
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