Everyone will be holding their breath until exactly 9:17pm, when a little bit of Luxembourg will land on the moon after a four-and-a-half-month journey from Cape Canaveral, where ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 2 was launched by Spacex. To preserve fuel (and thus perform better on the moon), Resilience the lunar lander and Tenacious the rover have taken a trajectory a million kilometres from the moon to take advantage of its gravity.
The Japanese company’s first lunar rover, in April 2023, unfortunately failed to land on Luna. The lander, carrying the Emirati rover Rashid, lost contact with the control centre during its final descent, resulting in a crash on the lunar surface. Subsequent analysis revealed that a software error had caused the system to misjudge the altitude of the spacecraft, resulting in a premature descent and loss of control. Inevitably, this memory will be fresh in the minds of the engineers this evening, even if they are resolutely positive.
The lunar landing is planned for Mare Frigoris, a region near the north pole of the moon. If the mission is successful, it will mark the first commercial transaction of lunar resources, with the transfer of collected regolith to Nasa, which has symbolically purchased it for $5,000.
The Luxembourg event, sold out in two theatres at the Kirchberg cinema, will be preceded by a conference led by Belgian astronaut Raphael Liégeois, with Géraldine Naja (ESA director of marketing), Jean-Jacques Dordain (former director general of the ESA from 2003 to 2015 and recruited by 
Liégeois will then look back over 20 years of space conquest.
All will transpire in the presence of prime minister 
This article was originally published in French.
