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LUPEX (ISRO lander + JAXA rover)
Lunar Polar Exploration Mission
Joint ISRO-JAXA water-ice prospecting mission, designated Chandrayaan-5 by India. India's cabinet approved Phase A on 2025-03-10. Launches on JAXA's H3. Carries American and European instruments alongside Indian and Japanese ones.
Mission specifications
- Operator
- JAXA + ISRO
- Prime contractor
- JAXA + ISRO
- Launch
- 2028 (NET)
- Landing site
- Lunar south pole (permanently shadowed crater margin)
- Customer
- JAXAISRO
- Payload
- ~350 kg rover with drilling to 1.5 m + ISRO landeras of [1]Multi-instrument payload — REIWA, LTGA, TRITON, ADORE, ISAP, ALIS, NS, EMS-L, GPR, MIR, PRATHIMA
Key findings
- 1.Aims to survey permanently shadowed regions near the lunar south pole to determine the quantity and quality of subsurface water ice and assess its suitability for future human use.
- 2.Will carry a ~350 kg JAXA rover built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, deployed via a sky-crane-like arrangement and equipped to drill and analyze subsurface samples down to ~1.5 m depth.
- 3.Plans an international instrument suite led by the REIWA water-analysis package (LTGA, TRITON, ADORE) plus ISRO's ISAP, PRATHIMA and imaging spectrometers (MIR, ALIS), a NASA neutron spectrometer and ESA's EMS-L gas/temperature sensor.
- 4.Designed for an extended surface campaign of over 100 days, targeting long-duration operation and polar-night survival without radioisotope heaters, using special insulation after a rover weight redesign.
- 5.Divides roles so JAXA supplies the H3 launch vehicle and rover while ISRO provides the lander and its L9 liquid engine; India designates the mission Chandrayaan-5, with cabinet approval granted on 14 March 2025.
Mission outcome
LUPEX (Chandrayaan-5) is a jointly developed ISRO-JAXA polar prospecting mission still in development, targeting a launch no earlier than 2028 (a September 2028 window has been cited) on JAXA's H3 from Tanegashima. Following India's cabinet approval on 14 March 2025, the teams advanced through preliminary design (including a Joint Preliminary Design Review), hot-fire-tested the ISRO L9 lander engine prototype in 2025, and held the fifth Technical Interface Meeting in December 2025 in Japan. If successful, it would deliver the most capable robotic assessment yet of how much accessible water ice lies in the Moon's permanently shadowed polar terrain, informing the resource case for sustained human lunar operations.