The reason for the failure of the first commercial lunar landing was announced: it was "induced" by a crater and an error in height calculation caused the probe to crash.

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen for the clue delivery of rain and snow! CTOnews.com Hakuto-R, a lunar probe owned by Japanese private company ispace, crashed while trying to land on the moon in April this year. On friday evening, ispace revealed the reason for the failure, saying the probe's altitude sensor was jammed by a crater on the moon's surface, causing it to misjudge its altitude and crash into the moon.

Details of the accident were disclosed in a statement issued by ispace on may 26. During its descent, the probe encountered an unexpected topographical feature-a crater, the company said. The crater caused the altitude sensor on the probe to get an abnormal value. So the detector's computer thought the altitude sensor was malfunctioning and used another method of calculating its position based on expected altitude. As a result, the computer thought that the probe had landed on the lunar surface, but it was still about 5 kilometers above the lunar surface. When the landing time is reached, the probe continues to descend at low speed until the propulsion system runs out of fuel. At this point, the probe loses control and free-falls toward the moon.

Ispace said the mission had already reached eight of its nine milestones before the crash and that problems only arose in the final minutes of the descent phase. The company also said that since the cause of the accident was a software problem, it did not affect the hardware design of future missions. Company representatives said the accident would not affect ispace's plans to launch its second and third missions in 2024 and 2025, respectively.

If Hakuto-R succeeds in landing on the moon, it will be the first lunar probe operated by a private company. So far, only the United States, China and the Soviet Union have successfully achieved the feat of soft landing on the lunar surface. CTOnews.com previously reported that NASA also announced this week that through the orbiting lunar exploration satellite, the debris of the lander was scattered near the scheduled landing site of White Rabbit-R.

Ispace founder and CEO Zeman said in a statement: "We have now been able to identify problems during the landing process and have a very clear direction for improvement for our future missions. "