Japan today joined the small group of countries that managed to land their spacecraft on the Moon, but the future of the SLIM probe is uncertain, due to problems identified in its solar panels.
The Japanese aerospace agency (Jaxa) confirmed its landing on the Moon, but the device is experiencing problems with its solar cells, which are not generating electricity.
Jaxa CEO, Hitoshi Kuninaka, explained, at a press conference, that in its current state, the device’s battery will last several hours.
SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) landed on the lunar surface at 00:20 on Saturday in Japan (15:20 on Friday in Lisbon), after a 20-minute descent.
Kuninaka further detailed that the LEV-1 and LEV-2 vehicles attached to the module were properly separated from the assembly during the descent, and the images they captured of the lunar surface were being transmitted.
The result has a bittersweet taste for Japan, which had already made several failed attempts to land on the Moon, and which seeks to expand its presence and competitiveness in the global aerospace panorama.
So far, only the United States, Russia, China and India have successfully landed on Earth’s satellite, although only one country, the United States, has managed to land astronauts on the Moon.
For decades it became the main objective of the space race between the United States and the then Soviet Union. Although spacecraft from other countries and space agencies (Israel, Japan, United Arab Emirates or European Union) have also traveled there, they have not landed on the Moon, either because they did not have that objective, or because they failed.
Although the Soviet Union was the first to reach its vicinity with a spacecraft, the first astronauts to set foot on the Moon were the Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin Eugene Aldring in 1969, and since then ten others, all from NASA (agency American spacecraft), returned to Earth’s natural satellite in successive “Apollo” missions, which lasted until 1972.
Additionally, the US has carried out a total of 17 unmanned missions to the Moon. On November 16, 2022, it returned with the unmanned Artemis I mission to test and measure NASA’s technological capabilities to resume lunar exploration and subsequent sending of astronauts.
Since the Soviet Union managed to orbit the satellite with its Luna-1 probe in 1959, this country (later Russia) has sent around sixty missions, some of these manned (those from the Soyuz project) and others unmanned (those from the programs Luna and Zond).
Russian lunar probes arrived on several occasions, the last in January 1973 with the Luna-21 spacecraft, which managed to place the Lunokhod vehicle on lunar soil. In 1976, the Luna-24 spacecraft ended the series of unmanned lunar explorations.
Although last year Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his intention to resume the program, his Luna-25 spacecraft failed in its mission to explore the lunar South Pole when it crashed on the surface.
China joined this race in 2007, when it launched “Chang’e I”, named after the Chinese goddess of the Moon. On March 3, 2009, and after a year in lunar orbit, its mission ended when it reached the lunar surface.
On December 14, 2013, Chang’e-3 achieved a controlled landing and was the first Chinese mission to reach the Moon. In 2019, Chang’e-4 managed to land on the other side of the satellite.
This mission, which was a milestone, also managed to sprout a seed on the Earth’s satellite for the first time, in one of its experiments.
In January 2020, China successfully launched Chang’e-5 with the mission to collect samples from the visible side of the satellite and returned to Earth on December 17, 2020 with lunar rock, becoming the third country to achieve this, after from the United States and Russia.
Last year, India was the fourth country to reach and the first to reach the unexplored lunar South Pole, with Chandrayaan-3.
2024-01-20 08:35:00
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