Hakamada said work is already underway on ispace’s M2 lander, which will be similar to M1. “It’s not easy, but it’s feasible,” he said. Working with Draper, that gives us high confidence on landing.” “When other spacecraft have failed in the past, it’s always been in the landing phase. That confidence comes in part, he said, from working with Draper, which provided guidance, navigation and control software. “We have high confidence on the landing.” “From the design point of view, we did everything that we could do” to ensure a successful landing, Hakamada said, including external reviews of the spacecraft. In 2019, Beresheet, a privately funded Israeli spacecraft, crashed attempting to land on the moon, followed several months later by the failed landing of the Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft by India’s space agency ISRO. Only the United States, China and the former Soviet Union have successfully soft-landed on the moon. “However, it was probably necessary to spend this amount of time.” “At the time of the X Prize, I thought that we could launch three to five years after we started,” recalled Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, in a pre-launch interview. HAKUTO-R started 12 years ago as a team in the Google Lunar X Prize, a competition by the X Prize Foundation to stimulate development of commercial lunar landers. A second lander mission, M2, is scheduled for launch no earlier than 2024. Tokyo-based ispace considers HAKUTO-R M1 primarily a test flight of the spacecraft with several technology demonstration and promotional payloads on board, including the Rashid lunar rover from the United Arab Emirates. HAKUTO-R M1 will attempt a soft landing in Atlas Crater, located on the edge of Mare Frigoris in the northeastern quadrant of the near side of the moon. The spacecraft will fly a low-energy trajectory to the moon that will set the spacecraft up for a landing in about five months. The rocket’s second stage, after a second burn, deployed the HAKUTO-R M1 spacecraft for Japanese company ispace 47 minutes after liftoff. 8, also suffered delays, although it’s unclear if they are related. The previous Falcon 9 launch, of 40 OneWeb satellites Dec. The launch, previously scheduled for late November, slipped by nearly two weeks because of unspecified issues with the Falcon 9. The rocket’s first stage, making its fifth flight, landed at the company’s Landing Zone 2 at Cape Canaveral about eight minutes after liftoff. The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 2:38 a.m. 11 with the Falcon 9 launch of a Japanese lander mission that also carried a NASA cubesat. WASHINGTON - A new era of commercial lunar missions started Dec.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |