A Japanese rocket is set to lift off on Sunday, carrying a small module to land on the Moon in four to six months time, a new attempt after Japan’s failed test, while India just made its first successful moon landing.
The launch was delayed by one day due to bad weather conditions expected on Saturday at the Japanese space agency’s (Jaxa) launch site in Tanegashima (southwest of the country). The project mainly consisted of testing high-precision moon landing technology, at a maximum distance of 100 meters from the target instead of the usual few kilometers, with a small and light vehicle (700-730 kg). Hence the name of this module, SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon), and its nickname “Moon Sniper”.
For mobile exploration robots, “navigating steep slopes and rough terrain still presents a high degree of difficulty. This is why it is important to successfully perform high-precision (spaceship, editorial note) landings to enable efficient exploration in the future,” explains Jaxa on his website. In addition, the area suitable for exploring the Moon’s polar regions is “limited to a very small area”, Jaxa notes.
If the landing is successful, SLIM will also have to perform, using a multispectral camera, an analysis of the suspected rock composition of the lunar mantle, the internal structure of the Moon which is still poorly understood.
The global race to explore the Moon is heating up after India successfully landed a spacecraft there on Wednesday; Previously, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China had successfully landed on the moon. Russia has just failed in its new endeavor, its Luna-25 space probe crashing last Saturday on lunar soil.
Japan is still experiencing some failures
Japan had attempted last November to land a mini-spacecraft on the Moon that had departed on board the American mission Artemis 1. However, communication with “Omotenashi” (“hospitality” in Japanese) was lost shortly after its arrival. space, due to battery failure.
And in April this year, a young private Japanese company, ispace, failed to land the Hakuto-R module, which likely crashed on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite. “The moon landing remains a very difficult technology” to master, SLIM project manager Shinichiro Sakai told the press on Thursday, at the same time expressing respect for the success of the Indian mission.
The Jaxa H2-A rocket, which is scheduled to lift off at 09:30 Japanese time (00:30 GMT) Sunday, must also carry a satellite named XRISM, an X-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission, into space.
The XRISM mission is the result of a collaboration between Jaxa, NASA America, and the European Space Agency (ESA). “X-ray astronomy allows us to study the most energetic phenomena in the universe. It holds the key to answering important questions in modern astrophysics: how the largest structures in the universe evolved, how our constituent material was distributed throughout the cosmos, and how galaxies were formed by massive black holes at their centers.” explains Matteo Guainazzi, ESA project scientist for XRISM.
Jaxa should also bounce back with the dual SLIM/XRISM mission, as the space agency has suffered several major failures since last year. After the failure of the small Epsilon-6 launcher shortly after liftoff last October, Jaxa did suffer two further setbacks in February and March this year with the next-generation H3 launcher, which still has not failed its first mission.
