Private Japanese moon lander crashed due to laser errors, ispace says

A cubic lunar lander on four legs sits on the dusty surface of the moon next to a small four-wheeled rover.

A lander built by Japanese company ispace crashed on the lunar surface while attempting to make the nation's first private moon landing earlier this month — and now we know why.

Today (June 24), ispace released a statement detailing just what went wrong with the lander, named Resilience. The company said the spacecraft's laser range finder, or LRF, experienced an anomaly that prevented Resilience from obtaining valid measurements of its distance from the lunar surface. This prevented the moon lander from decelerating at the proper rate, causing it to crash.