Japan’s SLIM mission successfully reaches moon’s surface, despite landing challenges and solar battery issues

The Japanese Space Agency announced on Thursday that its first lunar mission had succeeded after its vehicle reached the surface of the moon, in a successful demonstration of its precise landing system.

Announcement

Japan became the fifth country in history to reach the moon when the advanced SLIM vehicle landed on the moon’s surface early Saturday.

But the problem of the probe’s solar batteries made it difficult at first to know whether the vehicle had landed in the target area, and the images that reached the ground showed the vehicle as if it was upside down.

While most previous probes used landing zones about 10 kilometers wide, the SLIM rover was targeting an area only 100 meters wide.

Improving landing accuracy would give scientists access to more parts of the moon.

One of the spacecraft’s main engines lost thrust 50 meters above the moon’s surface, causing a harder landing than planned.

After a few days of analyzing the data, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced that the spacecraft had landed about 55 meters from its target, in reverse, between two craters near Shiuli Crater, an area covered in volcanic rock.

But after landing, the rover’s solar panels ended up facing in the wrong direction, and the rover could no longer generate power. Officials said there is still hope that the probe will be able to recharge when the moon enters daytime in the coming days.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency project director Shinichiro Sakai said the images sent were exactly like the ones he had imagined and seen in computer renderings.

LEV-1, a robot equipped with an antenna and a camera, was tasked with recording the SLIM landing and transmitting images to Earth.

The project was the result of two decades of work on precision technology by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which has a long track record of successful space landings.

The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, launched in 2014, landed twice on the 900-meter (3,000-foot) asteroid Ryugu and collected samples that were returned to Earth.

The goal of Operation SLIM, nicknamed “Moon Sniper,” is to search for clues about the origin of the Moon, including analyzing minerals with a special camera.

Additional sources • dad