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Almost five months ago, the SpaceX rocket was launched from Florida, carrying two moon landers. Texas-based Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Spacecraft zoomed to the moon and became the first robotic commercial vehicle to stand upright on the moon in March.
Another spacecraft developed by the Japanese-based company ISPACE has now arrived at its destination.
Resilience is on track to try a touchdown at 3:24pm on Thursday, as the undeniable lunar landing gear is being called.
Ispace isn’t too worried about losing at the “first” top grade. And company executives said that a slow, steady path to the moon could provide long-term benefits to Ispac.
“The good thing about the past four or five months of trajectory is that there are small things each day that we didn’t expect,” ISPACE’s Chief Financial Officer Jumsei nozaki told CNN in January. “This (the journey to the moon) is in the learning stage.”
Three teams of ISPACE employees are in and out of the company’s mission control room in Tokyo, where they practice months of practice in overseeing the unpredictable and bold physics of deep space travel.
However, such a progressive approach to the moon does not guarantee successful landings.
The first attempt to place the spacecraft on the moon at ISPACE ended with a collision landing in April 2023 after a 4½ month journey from Earth.
Ultimately, the long trajectory of Resilience offers an isspace of both its advantages and disadvantages.
Resilience lies on the path to the moon, often referred to as low-energy transfer. It is essentially a slow cruise route. Just like traveling to a friend’s house by bike and Coast downhill, there’s very little fuel or energy.
On such a path, Resilience Landers travel hundreds of thousands of miles, surge into deep space, waiting for the lunar gravity to naturally capture the spacecraft in lunar orbit.
In contrast, other vehicles, such as the Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and the Nova-C Lander, developed by the intuitive machines of the Texas-based company, use large engines to launch on much more direct roads. For example, the latest NOVA-C Lander, an intuitive machine, arrived on the moon about a week after takeoff.
Compared to the lunar landing group developed by iSpace’s competitors, it is lighter resilience and relatively inexpensive due to its smaller rocket engines.
With resilience in orbit spending all the time, mission operators can verify many types of systems during this long journey, including vehicle sensors, navigation and other software systems, Nozaki said.
However, there are drawbacks.
And the constellations said that regardless of the outcome of Resilience’s trip, Ispace will abandon its low energy transfer approach on its third mission.
The upcoming Lunar Lander of Ispace, called Apex 1.0, will fly in partnership with Massachusetts-based Draper, with the aim of taking a more direct route to the moon under the Artemis program’s CLP.
Reach the moon Kondo also said that it was “really important to our customers.”
These clients include research groups, businesses and governments who pay ispace to fly cargo such as scientific equipment on the Lunar Lander.
According to iSpace, spending months in transport can cause extra wear on the instrument due to the harsh radiation environment and shaking of the wild temperature of the space.
What’s next for Ispace’s Resilience Lander?
Still, the company hopes that the three groups of scientific equipment currently on board will carry out exciting tests after the vehicle reaches the moon on Thursday.
Resilience conducts water electrolytic factor experiments, a module designed to test algae-based food production, a deep-sea radiation monitor, and a device intended to generate hydrogen and oxygen in a Red Lun environment.
Ispace’s first lunar lander had descended towards Atlas Crater, a feature on the northeast side of the face near the moon when it crashed in April 2023.
Male Frigolith is significantly flatter than the Atlas Crater area, providing potentially easier navigation terrain. In a statement, Ispace said a new landing site has been selected to provide “flexibility.”
The company will live stream Thursday’s touchdown attempt on YouTube and X.
If Resilience stands upright, Ispace will become the first commercial company outside the United States to bring out such feats. Ispace also joined Firefly, where Blue Ghost Lander made an untouched landing in March, becoming the only two companies to complete a fully successful touchdown for robotic Lunar Lander.
The intuitive machinery landed two vehicles on the moon near the moon’s Antarctic. However, each of those spacecraft landed on that side, limiting the science and research that the company could carry out.
Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines are both contractors for NASA’s Commercial Moon Payload Service or the CLPS Initiative, which is part of the Space Agency’s Artemis program. This is the framework NASA plans to bring humans back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. The robot missions carried out under the CLP serve as scientific pathfinders and aim to pave the way for astronauts to return.