2023-05-29 06:41:00
To Japanese company ispace revealed the reason for his probe Hakuto-R have suffered a accident in the month of April. At the time, the equipment ended up falling on the Moon due to an error made by itself due to its software thinking that the altitude was at zero while it was still 5 km from the ground.
This happened even after the probe had correctly activated its descent sequence when it was at an altitude of 100 km. Therefore, the probe thought it had already landed, despite continuing to descend at a speed of less than 1 m/s. Then the system ran out of fuel and with that, the team believes it fell into free fall to the ground.
According to what the company develops robotic space exploration technologies, the device’s software made the error after the probe went over the edge of a crater while heading towards the landing site. In this case, the sensor took an altitude reading of 3 km, a number greater than that predicted by the team that prepared the mission.
It is worth mentioning that the probe’s program is capable of disregarding abnormal altitude values in the landing module as a safety measure. But, he ended up making a mistake in this case, since he did not understand what was the true lunar terrain in his landing path.
This result could have been the first private mission and first Japanese vehicle to successfully land on the Moon, but it ended up failing. Even so, ispace will use the data obtained to improve the next trips of its probes to the Moon, which will take place in 2024 and 2025.
More about space probes: check out the Juno spacecraft issue that caused NASA to lose over 200 photos of Jupiter, as well as the retirement of InSight Mars.
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