Writing by Alperen Aktas in Istanbul
Africa-Press – Kenya. NASA has spotted possible debris of a crashed Japanese lunar lander on the moon, the US space agency has announced.
On its website, NASA on Tuesday released images by its Lunar Reconnaissance Satellite, showing the possible crash site of the Hakuto-R Mission 1.
The spacecraft was launched in December last year before private company ispace announced that an anomaly had occurred, resulting in the landing’s failure.
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.
Hakuto-R entered the moon’s orbit on March 21, but ispace reported that the vehicle, which was expected to land on the lunar surface on April 26, lost its contact with the Tokyo control center, and that the spacecraft may have crashed during the landing attempt.
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