A Japanese robotic spacecraft crashed as it tried to land on the Moon in late April due to a software glitch, a probe has revealed.
The Japanese company Ispace said during a news conference on Friday that they had wrapped up their analysis, which showed that during the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander’s descent to the lunar surface, the spacecraft had estimated that it was very close to zero altitude even though in reality it was roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the surface.
As a result, the 340-kg lander slowed down its speed on its way down, finally running out of fuel and free-falling onto the Moon, according to the investigation.
“This is not a hardware failure. We don’t need to modify the hardware side,” Ispace chief technology officer Ryo Ujiie told reporters.
Ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada, for his part, stressed that the Hakuto-R Mission 1 “demonstrated a great deal of technical reliability, as our lander reached the lunar surface just prior to landing.” He added that the company had managed to “identify the issue during the landing and have a very clear picture of how to improve” its future missions.
The privately-funded spacecraft was launched by a SpaceX rocket in December 2022, and it took the lander five months to reach its destination. Communication with Hakuto-R was lost moments before it was due to touch down on the Moon on April 25.
Hakamada said at the time that despite not expecting to complete the mission, the company had "fully accomplished the significance of this mission, having acquired a great deal of data and experience by being able to execute the landing phase."