Ispace: Resilience’s failure was due to a hardware issue in laser range finder
In a press conference today, officials of the Japanese startup Ispace explained that the failure of its second lunar lander, Resilience, to land softly on the Moon on June 5, 2025 was due to a hardware issue in its laser range finder that prevented it from providing correct altitude data.
At the same time, they have not yet been able to pin down precisely what caused the failure. It could have been because of unexpected degradation during flight, or possibly a technical fault with the range finder in gathering data at the speeds and altitudes experienced.
The company is forming a task force in partnership with Japan’s space agency JAXA as well as NASA to try to figure out the issue. It is also going to add lidar instrumentation to future missions to provide a backup to the laser range finder. These actions will add about $11 million in additional costs, an amount Ispace says it can absorb.
Ispace is building two more lunar landers, one for NASA in partnership with the American company Draper, and the second for JAXA. It appears both missions are still moving forward.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
In a press conference today, officials of the Japanese startup Ispace explained that the failure of its second lunar lander, Resilience, to land softly on the Moon on June 5, 2025 was due to a hardware issue in its laser range finder that prevented it from providing correct altitude data.
At the same time, they have not yet been able to pin down precisely what caused the failure. It could have been because of unexpected degradation during flight, or possibly a technical fault with the range finder in gathering data at the speeds and altitudes experienced.
The company is forming a task force in partnership with Japan’s space agency JAXA as well as NASA to try to figure out the issue. It is also going to add lidar instrumentation to future missions to provide a backup to the laser range finder. These actions will add about $11 million in additional costs, an amount Ispace says it can absorb.
Ispace is building two more lunar landers, one for NASA in partnership with the American company Draper, and the second for JAXA. It appears both missions are still moving forward.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I was under the impression that a “laser range finder” is a lidar. So the bit about “adding” lidar is a tad confusing. Perhaps the intent is to a add a second, dissimilar, lidar as a check on the first. My curiosity about the matter, though, does not extend to spending two hours of my remaining life sitting through what is, no doubt, a heavily-accented “English as she is spoke” presser in the very possibly forlorn hope of finding out.
Dick Eagleson,
So the item that stuck out about the laser discussion was their statement “there was not enough power”. Was that the power to the laser, or the emitted beam/return beam was too weak? I think I know why they went with a laser rangefinder, it is lighter. Maybe go with a RADAR next time.
They also mentioned that Hakuto was coming in too fast as well. A bad burn?
I’m about to show my ignorance here. And I fully admit it.
Why would LIDAR add another 11 million? Some basic LIDAR hardware options can’t cost more than a few thousand for earth bound tools. Obviously we need that to be hardened for space use, so let’s multiply that cost by a thousand. That gives us 1-2 million . Then we need coding, testing, etc. I struggle to see this costing more than $5.
Of course govts are involved.. so I should just shut up. :)
Edward KK: The added cost isn’t just adding the new equipment (which is not a trivial act). It also includes the cost of this investigation and the creation of a task force that includes other outside players. Those players have to be paid for their work.
$11 million is actually a very small number, compared to the overages routinely seen in government-run planetary projects.
Jay,
All very on-point questions. More stuff I won’t find out by not watching the presser – and probably would not find out even if I did watch.
The radar suggestion is a good one given that that’s all the Apollo LMs had aboard and all they seemed to need.
Something else of note:–LIDARs on self-driving cars will burn into your cell-phone’s CCD camera-on-chip.
PS…I wonder if the regolith might have a few uber-reflective crystals that can dazzle the LIDAR.
I’m glad that Neil and Buzz didn’t have nor need LIDAR.
The old ways are the best ways.
Jeff Wright
I bet your correct.
Are they even testing this whole system in a vacuum chamber with sim rigolith.?
you’re
You got a point there Jeff. It might scatter it or absorb it. According to flight diagrams, Resilience was coming in at an angle, was the laser pointing at an angle and reflecting in a different direction?
I was curious where this LRF (Laser Range Finder) was and if there was more than one. Not many English diagrams out there, all I could find is this one of Resilience. Unfortunately this diagram only gives general information.
Jeff Wright,
That lidar vs. cell phones thing sounds like a “new wive’s tale” so to speak. Any lidar powerful enough to mess with cell phone cameras would probably toast your retinas first and that much power is never going to be allowed on roads.
More to the point, the vast majority of self-driving cars, for the foreseeable future, are going to be Teslas which don’t have lidars at all.
The only self-driving cars that do have them, at this point, are those Waymo monstrosities. They cost at least $150K each to build, the driverless rides cost more than calling a Lyft or an Uber and their “autonomy” software is notably inferior to Tesla FSD. The Waymos are also pretty tightly geofenced. I don’t think they’re long for this world – and not just because anti-ICE “protesters” seem to have taken a fancy to setting them on fire.
So not to worry.
As to lidars, “laser range finders” and Moon landers, you could well be right about regolith interactions being the issue, though I’d bet more on too much absorption than on too much reflection.
Doubting Thomas,
The old ways are sometimes still useful and not to be discarded just because there is a newer way. At least not until the new way has been well bug-chased and wrung out. But one of those “old ways” was throwing entire rockets away after launching them. That is one old way we’re well rid of.
Jay,
More good questions. My best wishes on finding answers. Please share if you do.
No wive’s tale–there was cellphone video footage of each car-LIDAR’s pulse leaving dead pixels out.
Looked like a tommy gun.
The chief offender is Volvo’s 1550nm LiDAR that seems to fry CMOS sensors. Eye safe, however–or so the claim is.
Windroid has footage..search for “LiDAR sensor will fry your phone’s camera!”
I can’t get *this* phone to link for crap.
iSpace has boiled down their two hour conference to a forty minute English only fault analysis on Youtube.
So, the LRF was supposed to work at 3km altitude, but got no signal back, Resilience was going 66 m/s and descending. The LRF finally received a signal back at an altitude of 893m and initiated a burn. It slowed from 66m/s to 44 m/s at the loss of signal with telemetry showing an altitude of 192m.
It is funny, our discussions here are close to iSpace’s same possible assessments:
1. Albedo – Jeff talking about reflections in the soil.
2. The laser incidence angle might have been off due to the reflectivity.
3. The laser’s power was low compared to the first lander’s LRF.
4. The higher speeds caused poor performance. I think they mean to say was it too much to process for the lander.
5. Harsh environment: thermal cycles and possible electronics degradation due to radiation. I wonder if they are talking about the two solar events we had in the last month, a M8.46-class solar flare and a CME on the 15th.
Could be one, could be two, it could be all five!
Looks like their corrective actions for landers 3 and 4, they will be using multiple sensors (LiDARs), a camera, and RADAR.
Somebody tell the Japanese that “angle of incidence=angle of deviation” has nothing to do with hentai or tentacle…um..
….to quote Andrew Wiles–“I think I’ll stop now.”
The footage I referred to
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/lwTXtG9v4L0
Of interest
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-glass-nanostructures-visible-photonics-assumptions.amp
I was thinking about unilluminable rooms…that looks like a zig-zag of a sort…reflective bits could direct light down to be absorbed by darker grains.