Japanese Aerospace Firm Poised to Land Spacecraft on the Moon

A Japanese aerospace firm called Ispace is set to put a spacecraft on the Moon this week. Resilience, the star of Ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 2, has spent nearly six months circumnavigating Earth and the Moon in preparation for its final descent. If all goes well, the spacecraft will touch down on the lunar surface Thursday afternoon.

Resilience was a travel companion to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander, which successfully touched down on a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille on March 2. Together, the landers launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15. But while Blue Ghost took just a month and a half to reach its target, Ispace wanted Resilience to stop and smell the roses along the way. The lander completed a lunar flyby before leveraging the Moon's gravity to initiate a slow, fuel-efficient path toward lunar orbit, which it entered on May 6 ...