Ispace’s Resilience lander successfully enters lunar orbit

Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience
Ispace today announced that its lunar lander Resilience, launched in January by SpaceX, has now been successfully inserted into lunar orbit,
Ispace engineers performed the injection maneuver from the Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan in accordance with the mission operation plan. The orbital maneuver required a main thruster burn lasting approximately 9 minutes, the longest to date during Mission 2. RESILIENCE is now maintaining a stable attitude in its planned orbit above the lunar surface. Mission operations specialists are now preparing for final orbit maneuvers after reaffirming Ispace’s ability to deliver spacecraft and payloads into lunar orbit. A lunar landing is scheduled for no earlier than June 5, 2025 (UTC) (June 6, 2025, JST).
If all goes right, Resilience will touch down in Mare Frigoris in the northern latitudes of the Moon’s near side, as shown on the map to the right.
This is Ispace’s second attempt to soft land on the Moon. Its first attempt, Hakuto-R1, got within three kilometers of the surface in Atlas Crater (also shown on the map), but then its software mistook its altitude, thinking it was only a few feet above the surface and shut down the engines prematurely, causing it to crash.
This second landing is critical for the company’s future. It has contracts for future landers from both NASA and Japan, but a failure now might cause both governments to reconsider those deals.
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience
Ispace today announced that its lunar lander Resilience, launched in January by SpaceX, has now been successfully inserted into lunar orbit,
Ispace engineers performed the injection maneuver from the Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan in accordance with the mission operation plan. The orbital maneuver required a main thruster burn lasting approximately 9 minutes, the longest to date during Mission 2. RESILIENCE is now maintaining a stable attitude in its planned orbit above the lunar surface. Mission operations specialists are now preparing for final orbit maneuvers after reaffirming Ispace’s ability to deliver spacecraft and payloads into lunar orbit. A lunar landing is scheduled for no earlier than June 5, 2025 (UTC) (June 6, 2025, JST).
If all goes right, Resilience will touch down in Mare Frigoris in the northern latitudes of the Moon’s near side, as shown on the map to the right.
This is Ispace’s second attempt to soft land on the Moon. Its first attempt, Hakuto-R1, got within three kilometers of the surface in Atlas Crater (also shown on the map), but then its software mistook its altitude, thinking it was only a few feet above the surface and shut down the engines prematurely, causing it to crash.
This second landing is critical for the company’s future. It has contracts for future landers from both NASA and Japan, but a failure now might cause both governments to reconsider those deals.