The Japanese Space Agency announced on Friday that its unmanned spacecraft has landed on the moon, but the agency is still “verifying its status.” More details will be revealed in a press conference soon.
The intelligent lunar lander landed on the moon’s surface at approximately 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time (15:20 GMT). The Intelligent Lunar Lander – a lightweight spacecraft the size of a passenger vehicle – relies on precision landing technology that promises greater control than any previous lunar landing.
It is noteworthy that most previous probes used landing zones about ten kilometers wide, but the smart Japanese vehicle aims to land in an area that is only one hundred meters wide.
The intelligent lunar lander is the result of two decades of work on precise technology by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Organization (JAXA), and if successful, Japan will become the fifth country to land on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India. JAXA said that the main goal of the mission is to test a new landing technology that would allow any mission to the moon to land “where we want, and not where it is easy to land.”
The mission comes just ten days after the failure of the moon mission launched by a private American company, when a fuel leak occurred in the spacecraft hours after launch.
The vehicle, called Moon Sniper, was launched on a Mitsubishi H2A rocket last September.
It initially orbited the Earth before entering the moon’s orbit on Christmas Day.
Japan also hopes that the success of the attempt will help restore confidence in Japanese space technology after a number of failures.
It was a spacecraft designed by a Japanese company that apparently crashed during an attempt to land on the moon last April, and this was preceded by the failure of an attempt to launch a rocket in its first appearance in March.
JAXA has a proven track record of successfully carrying out difficult landings. The unmanned spacecraft, “Hayabusa 2,” which was launched in 2014, landed twice on the asteroid Ryugu, which is nine hundred meters long, and collected samples that were returned to Earth.
The smart spacecraft carries two small, independent landers, the LEV-1 and LEV-2 lunar landers, which will be launched just before landing.
(AP)
