Japan’s ispace company is set to launch its second lunar lander, Resilience, early Wednesday morning (Jan. 15), carrying a mini moon rover called Tenacious and five science payloads. The dual moon mission marks the first of several planned lunar launches for 2025.
Resilience is based on ispace’s Hakuto-R solar-powered lander platform, which stands 7.5 feet tall and 8.5 feet wide with four landing legs. The lander will be launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:11 a.m. EST.
The Resilience mission includes the Tenacious rover, equipped with a high-definition camera and a small shovel for collecting samples. The rover also carries “Moonhouse,” a small red house framed in white created by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg.
In addition to the rover, the lander will carry several scientific instruments, including an algae-based food production module, a water electrolyzer experiment, and a deep space radiation probe. These experiments aim to demonstrate the feasibility of producing oxygen and hydrogen from lunar water resources, cultivating algae as a potential food source, monitoring radiation levels during the Earth-moon transit, and characterizing the ionizing radiation environment.
Resilience will also carry lessons learned from ispace’s first lunar landing attempt, which crashed into the moon in April 2023. The company is building a larger lander, Apex 1.0, with its first outing expected to launch around 2026.
Source: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/whats-flying-to-the-moon-on-ispaces-resilience-lunar-lander