The private Resilience moon lander now has a target touchdown date.
The Tokyo-based company ispace, which built and operates Resilience, announced Monday (March 3) that it's eyeing June 5 for the spacecraft's lunar touchdown attempt.
The current plan calls for Resilience to land that day at 3:24 p.m. EST (2024 GMT) near the center of Mare Frigoris ("Sea of Cold"), a basaltic plain in the moon's northern reaches. But that's not set in stone.
"Should conditions change, there are three alternative landing sites that are being considered with different landing dates and times for each," the company said in a statement on Monday. "A decision about landing will be made in advance, but the window for landing is open from June 6 through June 8, 2025."
Related: Japan's Resilience moon lander aces lunar flyby ahead of historic touchdown try (photo)
Resilience is ispace's second moon lander. The first reached lunar orbit successfully in March 2023 but crashed during its landing attempt a month later.
Resilience launched Jan. 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which also sent Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander into the final frontier. Blue Ghost aced its touchdown early Sunday morning (March 2), becoming just the second private vehicle ever to soft-land successfully on the moon.
Resilience is taking a longer, more circuitous path to Earth's nearest neighbor — one that didn't have a target landing date until Monday. (Previously, ispace had said touchdown was expected sometime in late May or early June.)
Resilience has been performing well in deep space, notching five of the 10 preplanned mission milestones to date. On Feb. 14, for example, the lander aced a flyby of the moon, zooming within 5,220 miles (8,400 kilometers) of the cratered lunar surface.
"Compared to Mission 1, Mission 2 is progressing as smoothly as can be expected from the moment of launch, which is proof that the mission operation specialists have made meticulous preparations. I feel that the experience and knowledge from the previous mission have been put to good use," ispace Founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said in the same statement.
“There are five remaining mission success milestones. We believe that Resilience will achieve them all with a majestic landing on the moon and the Tenacious rover will begin exploration," he added. "We will work as hard as we can to make that happen."
Tenacious is a microrover built by ispace's European subsidiary. If all goes to plan, the little robot will deploy from Resilience on the lunar surface and collect some dirt and gravel under a contract with NASA.
The lander carries four other science and technology payloads as well, including an instrument that's monitoring radiation levels in deep space and an experiment that will attempt to grow algae — a potential food source for future moon settlers — on the lunar surface.
Resilience will reach lunar orbit on or around May 6, according to Monday's statement. It won't be the next private vehicle to try its hand at a lunar landing: Houston-based company Intuitive Machines, which pulled off the first-ever private moon touchdown in February 2024 with its Odysseus spacecraft, will try to repeat the feat on Thursday (March 6) with a lander named Athena, which launched on Feb. 26 and arrived in lunar orbit on Monday (March 3).
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