Japanese lunar lander presumed lost after attempting to land on Moon

It would have been the first successful moon landing for a commercially-developed spacecraft

The whereabouts of a Japanese lunar lander are unknown after flight controllers lost contact with it as it attempted to land on the surface of the moon on Tuesday.

The lunar lander, carrying a rover developed in the United Arab Emirates, was attempting to become the first commercially-developed spacecraft to successfully land on the moon. Touchdown was scheduled for 12:40pm on the east coast of the US, but the mission control team was unable to regain contact with the craft after a communications blackout.

The spacecraft launched from atop a SpaceX rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December and embarked on a three-month journey around the Earth to access the surface of the moon using a low-energy trajectory.

The journey reportedly went to plan until the final step. Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said his team was able to recieve data from the craft until it was time for the landing on Tuesday.

“We have not been able to confirm successful landing,” Mr Hakamada said in comments reported by CNN. “We have to assume… that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface. Our engineers continue to investigate the situation.”

Ispace, which is headquartered in Tokyo, develops robotic spacecraft technologies and has offices in the United States and Luxembourg as well as Japan. The lunar lander the ispace team lost contact with on Tuesday is called the Hakuto-R and was carrying a rover built by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai.

The European Space Agency was also involved in the production of the rover, and said that, if successful, the rover would have spent much its time on the moon exploring the Atlas Crater in the moon’s northeast.

Ispace got its start in partnership with a European organisation called White Label Space before becoming independent. The company competed to win the Google Lunar XPrize, which offered $20m to the company that could land a robotic rover on the moon and transmit data back to Earth.

The competition was shut down five years ago, but Ispace has continued to pursue the possibility of landing a rover on the moon in the years since.