Private Japanese moon probe snaps photo of lunar south pole ahead of June 5 landing

Japan’s private Resilience lunar lander has given us a nice shot of the moon just two weeks before its historic touchdown attempt.

On Thursday morning (May 22), the Tokyo-based company ispace, which built and operates Resilience, shared a photo on X that the probe took of the moon‘s south polar region.

“Resilience snapped this photo of the moon’s south pole from lunar orbit, capturing the rough terrain of the many geological features of the lunar surface (which some say look like cheese from afar!). This image presents an optical illusion to some — although the image is filled with concave craters, from this orientation they may look like they are convex to the eye. What do you see: craters or bumps?” ispace wrote in the X post.

Resilience launched on Jan. 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that also carried another private moon lander: Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost.

Blue Ghost touched down on March 2, becoming just the second-ever commercial vehicle to soft-land successfully on the moon. (The first was Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus spacecraft that touched down on the lunar surface in February of 2024.) Resilience — ispace’s second-ever moon lander — took a longer, looping, energy-efficient route to Earth’s nearest neighbor, finally arriving in lunar orbit on May 6.

The Japanese lander is scheduled to touch down on June 5 in Mare Frigoris (“Sea of Cold”), a volcanic plain in the moon’s northern hemisphere. Success would be huge for ispace and for Japan; the nation has just one moon landing under its belt, that of the SLIM (“Smart Lander for Investigating Moon’) spacecraft that landed in January 2024. (SLIM was operated by JAXA, Japan’s national space agency.)

ispace came close to notching that milestone: Its first moon lander reached orbit successfully in March of 2023, but failed during its touchdown try a month later after getting confused by the rim of a crater.

Resilience is carrying five science and technology payloads to the moon, including a miniature rover named Tenacious.

The little wheeled robot, which was built by ispace’s European subsidiary, will attempt to collect moon dirt under a contract that signed with NASA in 2020. Tenacious is also carrying some art on its front bumper — a piece called “Moonhouse” by Sweden’s Mikael Genberg.