A pity that the iSpace lunar lander appears to have failed. It carried an Irish experiment on board.
Communications have been lost with a lunar rover which was due to land on the Moon carrying samples developed in a lab at Dublin City University (DCU).
The plastic and metal strips were attached to the wheels of the spacecraft and were to be used to study the way moon dust sticks to different surfaces.
Japanese lunar exploration company iSpace was behind the mission but deemed the attempt to be unsuccessful after communication was lost with the unmanned spacecraft.
"We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," said iSpace CEO Takeshi Hakamada.
If successful, it would have been the first lunar landing by a private company.
If nothing else this underscores the fact that space is an intensely challenging environment. Only three nations, using state programmes, have managed to land spacecraft on the Moon. Consider the patchy record of success with probes to Venus and Mars, and all those again underwritten by states. It's not that private companies can't or won't succeed sooner or later but away from the super-heated rhetoric around some of the private enterprises involved and the personalities behind same the harsh truth is that this remains an extremely difficult exercise.
No comments:
Post a Comment