The race to land on the Moon will enter 2024 as more national space programs and private companies attempt to achieve this daunting feat.
Although only about half of all moon landing attempts are successful, space fans will likely receive many spectacular photos of the Earth and Moon along the way, such as the latest uploaded by Japan: The Uncrewed SLIM Mission, or Smart lander to explore the Moon, captured a rare photo of the Earth hanging above the Moon, although you may have to squint to see it. The photo shows Japan illuminated at dawn on Earth.
“When the SLIM team first saw this photo, they wondered… what is that white dot beneath the Earth?!” said JAXA, the equivalent of NASA in Japan, on X (formerly known as Twitter) December 20.
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When the photo was taken in September, the spacecraft was more than 60,000 miles from our planet.
Currently, SLIM is much closer to the Moon than to Earth and is expected to enter lunar orbit in less than a week.
JAXA will descend towards the lunar surface will land on January 20. Thanks to this, it will be several weeks before the landing on the Moon by the American company Astrobotic Technologies, which will try to bring five NASA instruments and other payloads to the surface. The SLIM mission follows the failed moon landing by Japanese private company ispace in April.
The reason why a spaceship appears to be traveling Next of the Moon in navigation camera images is the result of SLIM’s special fuel-efficient trajectory, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The varying speed of light
The SLIM mission launched on September 7 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan and is expected to land near the Shioli crater on the near side of the Moon.
Sumber: JIJI Press / AFP / Japan OUT via Getty Images
When a spacecraft reaches a point in space where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun is balanced, it can change direction easily without having to fight the pull of a planet or star, he told Mashable.
“With a little push from the rocket engine, you could fall back to the Moon via a path that passed over the Moon relatively slowly, allowing you to land easily,” he said. “The downside is that it takes a few months to get there from Earth, not a few days.”
While the spacecraft makes this leisurely journey, the Moon continues to do its job: orbiting the Earth every month.
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“Over the course of several months, the Moon orbits the Earth several times,” explains McDowell, “so during that time, sometimes compared to SLIM, the Moon is on the same side of the Earth and sometimes on the other side of the Earth.”
That SLIM Mission launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on September 7 and is expected to land nearby Shioli Crater on the near side of the Moon. The goal is to show what is called “precise landing” with an accuracy of less than 100 meters, a level of precision unprecedented in lunar landings. Most landing targets have a range of many square miles.
In August, India became the fourth country to land on the moon, joining an elite cadre of spacefaring nations – the former Soviet Union, the United States and China – who have achieved the feat. The achievement came just days after Russia’s Roscosmos space agency lost its Luna-25 robotic spacecraft, which was orbiting the moon but apparently crashed after a failed flight maneuver. The two dueling missions sought to place their unmanned spacecraft near the South Pole.
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About 60 years have passed since the first unmanned moon landing, but landings are still difficult. The Moon’s atmosphere is very thin and creates almost no resistance that could slow a spacecraft approaching Earth. Additionally, there is no GPS system on the Moon that could help guide a ship to a landing site.
Several countries and private companies are focusing on the moon’s south pole because of ice that is likely buried there in permanently shadowed craters. Natural resources are urgently needed because they can provide drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel for future missions, thereby ushering in a new era in space flight.
2023-12-21 23:37:34
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