A private corporation in Japan is getting ready to try something that no other private enterprise has ever done before: land on the moon.
About a month ago, the ispace firm in Tokyo launched its very own spacecraft into an orbit around the moon. On Tuesday, flight controllers will command the vehicle to descend from an altitude of 60 miles (100 kilometers), land, and then begin its next mission. Hakuto is the Japanese word for white rabbit.
The lander measures 7 feet in length and is carrying a miniature lunar rover built by the United Arab Emirates as well as a toy-like robot from Japan that is intended to move around on the surface of the moon.
A Tokyo firm plans to launch the world’s first commercial lunar lander.
After being launched in December, the Hakuto spacecraft travelled a circuitous path to the moon and sent back photographs of Earth at various stages along the journey.
Russia, the United States of America, and China are the only three nations that have ever successfully landed on the moon. In the year 2019, an Israeli nonprofit organization made an attempt to land on the moon, but the spacecraft was destroyed on impact.