Tracking of Moon landing Hakuto-R Mission 2

On June 5th, Hakuto-R mission 2 “Resilience” landed on the lunar surface, in a ‘hard landing’. This Moon lander, developed by the company ispace, had several missions and a moon rover on board. We tracked the landing with the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope. During the landing, we shared our signals in a livestream.

Our signals clearly showed the progress of each of the phases of the landing. On 19:15:45 the signal suddenly disappeared. Just before that, we could clearly see the reflection of Hakuto’s signal on the Moon, indicating that it was close to the surface. In a press release, ispace indicates that the landing was a hard landing.

This was the seventh moon landing we tracked with the renovated Dwingeloo telescope. Special for this observation was that it was the first Moon landing we tracked on X-band (8.4GHz). An extra challenge was that we did not have tracking data for Hakuto-R. With a 0.1 degree beam, we had to scan around the Moon to find the lander when it was still orbiting.

Further analyses of our received signals are still possible. Our raw data is publicly available at https://data.camras.nl/hakuto-r/