The crash site of the lander and its scattered parts on the lunar surface have been captured by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, providing the first images of the location.
The moon has a reputation for being an inhospitable place for people, and occasionally even their machines. A new cemetery has been discovered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as it hovers above the Moon: it is the location of the private Japanese project Hakuto-R's crash.
During its approach to landing in April of this year, the Japanese company ispace's spacecraft crashed on the moon as it descended from a height of 100 kilometres above the lunar surface. Before it crashed on the moon and dashed all hopes, the mission intended to land close to Atlas Crater.
Now that the lander and its components are scattered across the moon's surface, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured the first pictures of the crash scene. The now-destroyed spacecraft can be seen in a collection of ten pictures taken by the LRO.
The photographs were taken by the spacecraft's narrow-angle cameras, which covered an area measuring around 40 km by 45 km. According to NASA, the LRO Camera scientific team started looking for the lander using a picture taken prior to the landing attempt and discovered an odd surface alteration close to the intended landing site.
The Hakuto-R lander unexpectedly accelerated as it descended to the surface, according to telemetry from the spacecraft. In the final 100 km of its descent from orbit to the Moon's surface, it had to slow down from a speed of 6,000 kilometres per hour to zero.
The spacecraft was launched on a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket in December of last year and has been in lunar orbit for nearly a month.
The lander was intended to launch the four-wheeled "Rashid" Rover from the United Arab Emirates as well as a two-wheeled, baseball-sized rover that was created by JAXA, Tomy, and Sony Group.