June 5 (UPI) — Privately owned Japanese aerospace company ispace on Thursday will make its second attempt to land a remotely controlled capsule on the moon as part of its settlement effort.
The uncrewed ispace Resilience moon lander is scheduled to touch down on the moon at 3:17 EDT on Thursday, but the landing time would change if its landing location does, too.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Jan. 15 launched the ispace lander to the moon along with a private Blue Ghost moon lander built by Firefly Aerospace, Space.com reported.
The Blue Ghost touched down on the Mare Crisium region of the moon on March 2.
The Resilience mission took much longer to reach the moon due to a low-energy transfer path that ispace chose for its lander, which arrived in orbit around the moon on May 6.
The Resilience is scheduled to land on the moon’s Mare Figoris region, which is located on the near side of the moon’s northern hemisphere.
The about 7.5-foot-tall lander contains a four-wheeled rover named Tenacious for exploring the lunar surface in the moon’s unexplored northern region.
The rover contains a high-definition camera, a shovel for collecting lunar samples for NASA and weighs about 11 pounds.
It also contains a tiny red cottage that its builder, Mikael Genberg, named the Moonhouse, which the rover will place on the moon’s surface.
The Resilience also might land on one of three secondary locations on the moon if the primary landing spot isn’t feasible, which would postpone its landing to another day.
If the primary landing spot is available, the touchdown is scheduled to be streamed live starting at 2:20 p.m. EDT on the ispace YouTube channel.
The livestream will be presented in English, but another livestream is available in Japanese.
A similar ispace mission in April 2023 failed when its uncrewed lander crashed while trying to land in the moon’s Atlas Crater. It was ispace’s first attempt to put a lander on the moon.
The mission is part of ispace’s plan to colonize the moon by having people living on it by 2040, ABC News reported.
The privately owned aerospace firm intends to build a city housing 1,000 people and would host thousands more who could visit as tourists.
Officials at ispace also plan to land a much larger lander on the moon with assistance from NASA. That mission is scheduled to launch by 2027.
