A milestone achieved halfway. The Japanese SLIM spacecraft achieved, on January 20, the most precise landing in history, just 55 meters from the set target – deviations of up to 10 kilometers were normal until now. A great success if you take into account that those responsible for the Japanese space agency (JAXA) were content to do it with a margin of 100 meters.
On the other hand, a failure during the descent in one of the two engines of the lunar module, when it was 54 meters from the surface of the Earth satellite, caused the device to end up landing on the moon upside down and with its solar panels pointing in the direction incorrect – towards the west –. This was explained by the general director of the JAXA agency, Hitoshi Kuninaka, during a press conference that took place early yesterday morning (Spanish time).
For this reason, the solar panels cannot receive sunlight as planned and the ship ran out of power after a few hours, as soon as the SLIM batteries (smart lander for investigating moon, or module of intelligent landing to investigate the Moon) were sold out.
This unexpected position of the module is what has been observed in the image taken a few days ago by the small robot LEV-2 – the size of a tennis ball – and which was transmitted by its brother LEV-1, who were traveling in SLIM, and which JAXA made public early yesterday.
From this space agency, they assure that, if this error had not occurred in the engine, the moon landing would have been even more precise. They estimate that the probe would have landed within a radius of about ten meters from the target, “possibly between three and four meters,” according to the person in charge of the project, Shinichiro Sakai, according to its positional precision before beginning the operation. of descent. JAXA is currently analyzing the causes of the engine loss, which they believe was due to an external factor.
The spacecraft was shut down from Tokyo less than three hours after landing to conserve enough battery to restart. JAXA maintains the hope that this will happen next February 1, as long as the sunlight reaches the solar cells that the ship has facing west, coinciding with the next sunset on the Moon.
Despite the setbacks and uncertainty about whether SLIM will come back to life, JAXA officials are satisfied with the overall outcome of the mission. Sakai said the images submitted were exactly the same as what he had imagined and seen in computer renderings. “Something we designed traveled to the Moon and took that snapshot. I almost fell when I saw it,” he said. Regarding the precise landing, Sakai noted that he would give SLIM a “perfect score”: “We showed that we can land wherever we want. “We have opened a door to a new era,” he assured.
It is true that despite how bumpy the landing ultimately was, SLIM was able to land with enormous precision on rugged, sloping terrain. This system is considered a powerful tool in the future exploration of the mountainous lunar poles, which are seen as a potential source of oxygen, fuel and water, fundamental elements to establish a permanent lunar base from which future expeditions to Mars will depart.
About the two robots that the spacecraft was able to put on the lunar soil, LEV-1 is a jumping robot equipped with an antenna and a camera, which had the task of recording the landing of SLIM and transmitting images to Earth. For its part, LEV-2 is a rover equipped with two cameras, developed by JAXA together with Sony, the toy manufacturer Tomy Co. and Doshisha University, which can modify its shape to move over the lunar soil. The two autonomous robots frame and select images independently, and both use LEV-1's antenna to send them back. Both are operating normally and have already sent 275 images of the surroundings of the landing site.
