BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Brad Klein reviews upcoming astronomical highlights with Bethlehem’s ‘Backyard Astronomy Guy,’ Marty McGuire.
This week, the sad news that an ambitious mission to land a robotic craft on the moon ended in failure last month.
The Japanese company ispace launched the spacecraft Resilience earlier this year with hopes of landing on the moon and deploying a small robotic rover that would send back HD photos from the lunar surface.
But a hardware failure in the lander’s laser rangefinder caused what is generously called a ‘hard landing’ in the nomenclature of space exploration.
“There’s now a new small crater on the moon, unfortunately,” said McGuire. “So the only pictures we have now are from NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which detected the crash landing site.”
From orbit, the LRO was able to photograph a dark smudge on the surface of the moon, the only evidence of the ambitious private mission of exploration.
But according to McGuire ispace does have more missions planned, and will learn from this one to improve their landing systems.