Japan's Resilience moon lander reaches lunar orbit in advance of the June 5 landing

Resilience, the Japanese lunar lander developed by ispace, achieved lunar orbit on May 6, in preparation for its historic landing attempt on June 5.

: Resilience, a privately funded lunar lander built by Japanese company ispace, successfully entered the moon's orbit on May 6, maintaining its course towards a scheduled landing attempt in Mare Frigoris on June 5. The mission, if successful, will mark Japan's second national lunar landing, following SLIM's achievement in January 2024. The spacecraft initially launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15, alongside another lunar lander named Blue Ghost from Firefly Aerospace. Resilience follows a low-energy trajectory, unlike its counterpart Blue Ghost, which already landed on the moon in March 2025 after taking a more direct approach.

Japan's private space company, ispace, has successfully maneuvered its lunar lander, Resilience, into lunar orbit as of May 6, 2025. This critical step marks the seventh milestone of the HAKUTO-R Mission 2 and sets the stage for an attempted lunar landing on June 5. The mission is a follow-up to ispace’s previous attempt in 2023, which ended in a crash. With Resilience now orbiting the Moon, hopes are high for Japan’s first commercial soft landing on the lunar surface.

The lander was launched on January 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, following a fuel-efficient, low-energy trajectory that included a lunar flyby in February. This strategy allowed Resilience to conserve fuel by taking a longer route of over 1.1 million kilometers, emphasizing sustainability and cost-effectiveness—core goals of ispace’s long-term lunar transport vision.

Resilience is targeting a landing site in the Mare Frigoris region, a basaltic plain in the Moon’s northern hemisphere known for its stable terrain and good solar access. Onboard the lander is a micro rover named Tenacious, developed by ispace’s Luxembourg team, which will explore the surface and collect data on lunar soil composition and terrain.

In addition to its scientific goals, the mission also carries cultural payloads. One such item is the Moonhouse, a small red cottage sculpture created by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg, symbolizing creativity and human presence. Another is a memory disk developed with UNESCO, containing multilingual texts and cultural artifacts intended to preserve human heritage on the Moon.

Over the coming weeks, the mission team will conduct detailed checks and adjustments to prepare for the landing. Drawing on lessons from its earlier attempt, ispace is focusing on improving navigation precision, descent controls, and landing sequence reliability, in hopes of making history with a successful touchdown.

Sources: Space.com, AP News, SpaceNews, ispace Inc.

SpaceExplorationTechnology