lost contact with the Japanese probe Hakuto, it would have been the first of a private company – time.news

2023-04-25 21:37:41

Of Paolo Virtuani

It was supposed to arrive on Tuesday at 18.40 in the Atlas crater and deposit the small Rashid rover made in the United Arab Emirates

Even Japan didn’t make it. There Japanese probe Hakuto-R Mission 1 at 18.40 on Tuesday 25 April it should have arrived in the large Atlas crater (87 km in diameter and 2 in depth) in the Mare Frigoris, north-east of the visible hemisphere of the Moon, but half an hour later of anxious waiting, in a sad press conference at the Tokyo control center, Takeshi Hakamada, chief executive of the company ispace had to admit that contacts were lost at a height of 10 meters above the ground and at a speed of 25 km/h. We have to assume that the landing failed. We will try to get in touch with the probe, however we are proud of what Mission 1 has achieved.

The three failed primates

If Hakuto-R had managed to land on the surface of our natural satellite, it would have achieved three firsts: the first time on the Moon by a private company – ispace recently said that it will be listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange – the first time by Japan and also from the United Arab Emirates. On board the 2.30-metre-high and 340-kilogram lander was in fact also the small Rashid rover built in the Emirates for the study of lunar plasma and how different materials interact with the particles present on the Moon. Also on board were Canadian artificial intelligence and imaging systems. The European Space Agency had provided communications support.

The White Rabbit

Hakuto (means white rabbit and refers to a Japanese legend of a white rabbit that lives on the moon) had been launched last December 11 from Cape Canaveral with an Elon Musk Falcon 9 Space X rocket. After a long elliptical low-energy trajectory lasting 4 and a half months that brought it up to 1.4 million kilometers from the Earth, it entered lunar orbit on March 20th. The descent manoeuvre, from a height of 100 kilometers, lasted an hour. In addition to the Rashid rover, the disk was also on board Write it down by the Japanese rock band Sakanaction.

The race to the moon

So far only the United States, Russia and China have managed to reach the surface of the moon with their state space services. In April 2019 the moon landing of the Israeli Beresheet mission of the SpaceIL company had failed, a few months later in September the Chandrayaan mission of India had also failed, confirming that landing on our satellite is anything but simple. For the Emirates it would have been the second important success in the space race, after the Al-Amal (Hope) probe entered orbit around Mars on February 8, 2021. In recent days Al-Amal has sent the most recent images to Earth details of Deimos, one of the two small moons of the Red Planet. Also on Friday, Emirati astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi will exit the International Space Station and become the first Arab to walk among the stars.

April 24, 2023 (change April 25, 2023 | 21:35)

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