NY.- A Japanese company has lost contact with a small robotic spacecraft that was sent to the moon, a sign that it may have crashed on the lunar surface.
After igniting its main engine, the Hakuto R Mission, built by Japan’s Ispace, left lunar orbit.
About an hour later, at 12:40 pm ET, the 7.5-foot-tall artifact was expected to land in the 54-mile-wide Atlas Crater in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.
But after the descent time, no signal was received from the spacecraft.
In live video shown by the company, a hush engulfed the control room in Tokyo where Ispace engineers, mostly young and from around the world, looked worried on their screens.
The Ispace spacecraft may have been the first step toward a new space exploration paradigm, as governments, research institutions, and companies are sending scientific experiments and some cargo to the moon.
The start of that lunar transport transition will have to wait for now for other companies to try later this year.
Two commercial spacecraft, built by US companies and financed by NASA, will be launched on the moon in the coming months.
