The Japanese company ispace has published an image taken by the Resilience spacecraft. It shows the Earth rising above the Moon.
Resilience is ispace’s second attempt to conquer the Moon. The first one took place in 2023. The Hakuto-R was very close to reaching its goal, but due to a malfunction, it crashed during the final landing phase. The ispace hopes that Resilience will be able to do what its predecessor failed to do.
The spacecraft was launched on January 15, 2025. After a 3.5-month flight, it entered an intermediate orbit around the Moon with a pericenter altitude of 100 km and an apocenter altitude of 2,300 km. In further preparation for landing, Resilience performed several maneuvers to reduce its altitude and “rounding”.
In anticipation of the imminent landing, ispace published a very spectacular image taken by Resilience on May 27. On it, you can see the rising of the Earth above the lunar horizon. If you enlarge the image, on the disk of our planet can be seen outlines of Australia and Asia. However, Japan itself, where the apparatus was built, was hidden by clouds at the time of taking the image.
Resilience should land on the Moon in the evening of June 5. For more details about the technical device of the Japanese vehicle and where you can watch a live broadcast of its landing, you can learn from our material.
