POSSIBLE DEBRIS FROM CRASHED JAPANESE SPACECRAFT FOUND ON MOON BY NASA

Fri 26 May 2023:

Possible lunar debris from a wrecked Japanese lunar lander has been found, according to NASA.

The Hakuto-R Mission 1 crash site was perhaps visible in photographs posted by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Satellite on its website on Tuesday.

The spacecraft was launched in December of last year, but an anomaly occurred, resulting in the landing’s failure, according to private company ispace.

The 10 images showed four large craters that the NASA team identified as “an unusual surface change at the likely landing site.”

At least four prominent pieces of debris were spotted, along with a few minor surface changes that could be other parts of the landing craft body.

LRO engineer Emerson Speyerer said in a blog post that the area will be analyzed further in the coming months with the Lunar Reconnaissance Satellite’s camera.

Ispace announced that work continues on the second and third phases of the Hakuto-R program and that data from the failed landing is expected to assist future missions.

It did not provide further details on Mission 1’s failure.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Satellite had previously detected remnants of Israel’s Beresheet and India’s Vikram spacecraft on the lunar surface, both of which had also failed.

The uncrewed Hakuto-R spacecraft was sent to the moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral base in the US.

The Hakuto-R spacecraft entered lunar orbit on March 21, but ispace claimed that the vehicle, which was scheduled to land on the lunar surface on April 26, lost touch with the Tokyo control center and may have crashed during the landing attempt.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

______________________________________________________________

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent