I managed to get some free time within 10 minutes of 1915 GMT today (3:15 PM EDT) for the landing of the ispace Resilience lander by scurrying around a bit. During the last two minutes of the descent to landing, telemetry went down and contact with the lander was lost. I left the ispace video playing, which they muted themselves. I think it was a half hour later that they signed off.
As I started working on this post, I went through every source I regularly check and found Spaceflight Now was covering a press conference in Japan, where ispace CEO and Founder Takeshi Hakamada said they consider the mission has failed. They will continue trying to contact the spacecraft, but don't expect a response.
When I first went to Spaceflight Now, there was one update which was time tagged almost two hours after the video coverage, 5:03 PM EDT and posted nearly a half hour later:
Here's the latest statement from ispace, which was published at 5:03 p.m. EDT (2103 UTC):
"At this moment, we have not yet been able to establish communication with RESILIENCE, but ispace engineers in our Mission Control Center are continuing to work to contact the lander. We will share an update with the latest information in a media announcement in the next few hours. Thank you for your patience--please check back with us soon."
Around 3:30 EDT, Spaceflight now posted this screen capture from 1:45 before expected landing (I believe that's in minutes and seconds). Notice that the display showed the lander's speed was 187 km/h and its altitude was 52 meters (171 feet) at L-00:01:45. You might want to think of that as an altitude of .052 km.
A few seconds with a calculator shows that .052km divided by 187 km/hr says it was 1.00 second (0.000278 hour) from crashing. It's not a proper calculation because the vehicle was firing its engines to slow itself down to land, but my guess is that there wasn't enough time to decelerate. It was simply going too fast to decelerate enough to land. That sounds like whatever caused it to be "too fast to slow down" is the root cause.
An update from the press conference seems to agree with that:
Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Center has been able to confirm the following: The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.
...
“Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause,” said Takeshi Hakamada, Founder and CEO of ispace. “We will strive to restore trust by providing a report of the findings to our shareholders, payload customers, HAKUTO-R partners, government officials, and all supporters of ispace.”
It's worth adding that ispace doesn't consider this anything other than a data-gathering opportunity. They already have decided they're not going to launch the Resilience-sized physical package but are developing what they're calling Lander 3 and Lander 4. There will be no more Resilience-sized lander missions.
Mission 3 will be using the Apex 1.0 lander, which is being designed by ispace-U.S. and Draper Laboratories as part of NASA's Commercial Resupply Services (CLPS) program.
Mission 4 will come from ispace in Japan, but will use a lander more similar to Apex 1.0 than Resilience.
Damn. Takes the slow slow route to the Moon but comes in way too hot. Well, there's always next time.
ReplyDeleteIt always struck me that those skinny legs and tall body was a recipe for tipping over. The Apollo landers had the ability to sorta pick where they would sit down. I understand that they must fit the package into the faring of the lift rocket. They will get it right eventually after enough heart breaks.
ReplyDeleteA laser rangefinder better be a long way away from the surface but close to the ground all the readings will be skewed by the dust being blown around the descent engine plume. Better to have an inertial nav module to control deceleration for the last 100m and a long probe off one pad to determine when to shut the engine down.
ReplyDeleteLooks to me like Ispace company has a market cap of about USD$500 million. cost of Resilience program was supposedly USD$16 million (idk if launch included), prior mission was somewhat more than USD$100 million. Cost of Resilience was supposedly offset by commercial payloads though not sure how that works as impactor instead of lander. Ispace will likely have to 100% self fund next attempt and it must successfully land or the company ceases to exist given the market cap and funding trend line. Have not investigated though suspect this is a deeply embarassing result for the Japanese nation and so some funding / technical assistance may be available.
ReplyDeleteI am confused if companies are doing any modeling or testing before launch even if just in kerbal or on wires over a sandbox.