The moon lander mission is the culmination of 12 years of engineering development and fundraising, an effort that included starts, stops, and wholesale changes in scope. Here’s a view of the sky show over Cape Canaveral as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster reignited its engines to propel itself back to the spaceport for landing. Once in orbit around the moon, ispace’s Hakuto-R lander will fire its main engine to autonomously descend to the lunar surface, targeting a landing in the northern hemisphere of the moon’s nearside. The Hakuto-R and Lunar Flashlight spacecraft launched on a course that will take them a million miles from Earth, well beyond the moon, on a long-duration but fuel-efficient low-energy transfer trajectory. Additional engine burns are scheduled throughout Hakuto-R’s four-and-a-half month journey from liftoff until it lands on the moon. Video from the Falcon 9’s on-board camera appeared to show ispace’s Hakuto-R spacecraft extended its four landing legs a few minutes after separation from the rocket, but ispace did not immediately verify whether mission controllers at the company’s Tokyo headquarters had established contact with the lander.Īssuming all is well with Hakuto-R, the lander will fire its main engine for its first post-launch maneuver about a day into the mission. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which led development of the Lunar Flashlight mission, quickly confirmed ground teams received the first signals from the moon-bound spacecraft. ![]() Six minutes later, SpaceX confirmed NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft had spring-ejected from a deployment mechanism on the upper stage. Live video from a camera on-board the rocket showed the moon lander separating from the Falcon 9. The Hakuto-R spacecraft, about the size of a compact car, deployed first from the rocket about 47 minutes into the mission. At T+plus 40 minutes, with the rocket soaring over Africa, the upper stage reignited for a nearly minute-long firing to propel the payloads on a trajectory to escape the grip of Earth’s gravity and head into deep space. The Falcon 9’s upper stage placed the Hakuto-R and Lunar Flashlight payloads into a low-altitude parking orbit less than eight minutes after liftoff. EST (0738 GMT) Sunday with the Hakuto-R moon lander for the Japanese company ispace. SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket at 2:38 a.m. The landing was the second time SpaceX has recovered a rocket onshore at Cape Canaveral in less than three days, following the launch and landing of a Falcon 9 booster Thursday on a mission carrying internet satellites into orbit for OneWeb. ![]() The reusable booster, designated B1073 and making its fifth flight to space, reversed course with a retro-rocket engine firing and flew back to Cape Canaveral for a successful touchdown at Landing Zone 2, one of SpaceX’s two seaside rocket recovery pads about 6 miles (10 kilometers) south of the Falcon 9’s launching stand. A few moments later, the booster stage broke free of the Falcon 9’s upper stage, which ignited a single engine to continue the climb into orbit. The launcher headed east over the Atlantic Ocean, surpassed the speed of sound in less than a minute, then shut down its first stage engines about 2 minutes and 13 seconds into the flight. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines delivering 1.7 million pounds of roaring thrust powered the Falcon 9 rocket high into the sky over Cape Canaveral. The launch Sunday occurred about 10 hours before the scheduled splashdown of NASA’s Orion crew capsule to wrap of a 25-day unpiloted test flight to the moon and back, and occurred on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 landing on the last visit of astronauts to the moon. Lunar Flashlight will fly to the moon on its own trajectory, eventually settling into an orbit that will repeatedly take the spacecraft as close as 9 miles (15 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole on the hunt for signs of water ice. The commercial Hakuto-R moon lander, developed by a Japanese company called ispace, will attempt to become the first privately-developed spacecraft to accomplish a soft landing on the lunar surface. ![]() 30 launch attempt, then returned the Falcon 9 to the pad for Sunday’s countdown. SpaceX rolled the rocket back into its hangar for troubleshooting after calling off a Nov. EST (0738:13 GMT) Sunday, a week-and-a-half after SpaceX grounded the mission to resolve an unspecified problem with the rocket. ![]() The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 launcher departed from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2:38:13 a.m. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral early Sunday with a commercial Japanese robotic moon lander and a NASA hitchhiker micro-payload called Lunar Flashlight that will seek out signs of water ice hidden in the permanently dark floors of craters at the moon’s poles.
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