Japan launches a robotic mission to the moon again after India’s success

The launch was originally scheduled to take place on Saturday, but was postponed first to Sunday and then to Monday due to adverse weather conditions expected over the weekend at the Tanegashima launch site in southwestern Japan.

Japan’s space program is one of the largest in the world, but its first attempt to use a lunar lander failed in November 2022. A new type of rocket also exploded during a test last month.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is now committed to high-precision lunar landing technology.

SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) is a lunar lander that weighs about 700 kg, is 2.4 meters high, 2.7 meters wide and 1.7 meters long.

JAXA intends to land it at a distance of 100 meters from a specific target, which is much less than the usual range of several kilometres.

For the rover, “moving up steep slopes and uneven terrain is still a high level of difficulty. That’s why it’s important to be able to land on the Moon.” [naves espaciales] JAXA states on its website that it has a high degree of accuracy to enable effective exploration in the future.

If the moon landing is successful, SLIM will also use a multispectral camera to analyze the composition of rocks that are thought to come from the lunar mantle, the moon’s internal structure, which is still poorly understood.

The race to reach the moon has gained new momentum after India successfully landed an unmanned spacecraft on the moon’s surface.

So far, only the United States, the Soviet Union, and China have managed to land robotic ships on Earth’s satellite.

For its part, Russia launched its first mission to the moon in nearly 50 years, but the probe collided with the surface of the moon on Saturday, August 19, after an accident.

previous failures

Japan had already attempted in November to land a small probe traveling on the US Artemis 1 mission.

But communication with “omotenashi” (Japanese for “hospitality”) was lost shortly after it was launched into space due to a battery failure.

In April, a private Japanese company called ispace also failed to land its Hakuto-R lander.

“The moon landing is still a very challenging technology,” SLIM Project Director Shinichiro Sakai stressed Thursday.

The JAXA H2-A rocket, scheduled for launch on Monday at 0926 (0026 GMT), will carry into space the XRISM satellite, an instrument for spectroscopy and X-ray imaging.

The XRISM mission is the result of a collaboration between JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

“X-ray astronomy allows us to study the most energetic phenomena in the universe,” explained Matteo Guainazzi, ESA’s XRISM project scientist.

“It is the key to answering important questions in modern astrophysics: how do the largest structures in the universe evolve, how matter of which we are ultimately made is distributed in the universe, and how galaxies are formed by supermassive black holes at their centers,” he added.

The SLIM/XRISM dual mission will also be able to catalyze JAXA, which has suffered several failures since last year.

After the failed launch of the Epsilon-6 small launch pad in October, JAXA suffered two more setbacks in February and March this year with its next-generation H3 launch pad, which has yet to complete its first successful mission.