Japanese startup Ispace has announced that its Resilience lunar lander has completed all planned orbital maneuvers while circling the moon and is now being readied for a landing attempt scheduled for early Friday morning.

The company released a statement Saturday saying the lander will begin its descent from a circular lunar orbit , automatically firing its main propulsion system to gradually decelerate and adjust its altitude.

The goal is to achieve a soft landing near the Mare Frigoris, or Sea of Cold, in the moon¡¯s northern hemisphere.

¡°Resilience is now ready to attempt a historic landing on the moon, carrying not only the payloads of our customers, but also the hopes of our employees, their families, our partners and all of our supporters,¡± said Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of Ispace, in the statement.

This is Ispace¡¯s second attempt at a moon landing following the failure of its Hakuto-R Mission 1 in April 2023, when a software error caused the lander to misjudge its altitude, resulting in a crash from approximately 5 kilometers above the lunar surface, according to a company postmortem analysis following the accident.

¡°We have leveraged the operational experience gained in Mission 1 and during this current voyage to the moon, and we are confident in our preparations for the success of this lunar landing,¡± Hakamada said.

The current mission ¡ª Hakuto-R Mission 2 ¡ª carries a diverse set of scientific and cultural payloads. Among them is the Tenacious microrover, which was developed in part with the European Space Agency and will collect lunar regolith under a contract with NASA, in one of the first transactions involving resources on the lunar surface and a significant step toward developing the cislunar economy.

If the mission is successful, Tenacious will become the first European-built rover to operate on the lunar surface.

Other onboard payloads include a lunar water electrolysis system, a module for food production in space and a deep-space radiation sensor.

Resilience is also carrying the Memory Disc ¡ª a collaborative effort with UNESCO and U.S.-based innovation platform Barrelhand ¡ª which contains 275 world languages and cultural artifacts. Also included are a commemorative alloy ¡°Mobile Suit Gundam UC¡± plate by Bandai Namco and a small sculpture of a red house called ¡°The Moonhouse¡± by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg.

The lander launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA¡¯s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 15, alongside Firefly Aerospace¡¯s Blue Ghost lander, which landed March 2 and operated until 6:15 p.m. CDT on March 16. Resilience entered lunar orbit on May 7.