This Friday, Japan became the fifth country to land a ship on the Moon, 55 years after Neil Armstrong arrived on the Earth’s satellite and after six successful missions sent by the US, the former Soviet Union, China and India. (last August). The SLIM spacecraft of the Japanese space agency (JAXA) has managed to place the Moon Sniper module on the lunar surface after 4:30 p.m. (GMT 1), although a failure in the deployment of its solar panels prevents it from transmitting information.
After the first moments of uncertainty that questioned the success of the mission and even whether the lunar module would not have suffered severe damage during the landing. Hitoshi Kuninaka, general director of JAXA, stated in a press conference that the mission could be considered successful, although the data that has come from the ship is scarce.
“We believe the landing itself was successful as the spacecraft sent back the telemetry date, meaning most of the equipment on board was working.” Both Lev-1 and Lev-2, palm-sized robots, were successfully deployed before the spacecraft landed on the moon, she noted.
The first is designed to jump in and take measurements with an onboard thermometer, radiation monitor, and slope sensor. Lev-2, a ball-shaped mini-rover designed with Takara Tomy, the toy firm behind Transformers, opens to reveal two cameras. NASA’s communications network is receiving data from the spacecraft and the small LEV-1 robot through one of the radio antennas in Madrid.
The ship had been in lunar orbit since December 25 and had been on the correct trajectory to land on the moon for a week now. Regarding communication with the ship, the person in charge of JAXA was cautious.
For Kuninaka, as the position of the moon changes, sunlight could hit the solar cells and recharge the ship’s battery. However, this could take more than a month. “We could say that it is now in sleep mode,” Kuninaka acknowledged when asked by the press.
The craft was designed to land on a slope and then tilt slightly on its main legs. One of the hypotheses suggests, however, that the module could have overturned and hence could not have deployed its solar panels.
Exclusion from the club of countries in the space elite has been a sore point for Japan, which beat archrival China to launch its first satellite in 1970 but has since taken a backseat to a string of space successes. high profile Chinese. That includes the world’s first soft landing on the far side of the Moon in 2019 and the landing on Mars in 2021.
India had also eclipsed Japan, managing to land near the lunar south pole in a second attempt last August. While the Americans and Soviets sent spacecraft to the Moon during the Cold War, the United States and Russia have had difficulty trying to return: Russia’s Luna-25 crashed last August and a NASA-backed mission by the startup Astrobotic Technology Inc. of Pittsburgh failed this month.
For Japan, landing on the moon has been even more difficult to achieve. Its space agency, JAXA, lost contact with a lunar lander in late 2022, while Tokyo-based Ispace Inc. also suffered a communication failure with a moon-bound craft last April.
Other setbacks include the botched debut of JAXA’s H3 heavy-lift rocket, which failed after liftoff last March and has not flown since. Meanwhile, JAXA’s smaller Epsilon rocket is also grounded following an explosion in October 2022.