The Japanese agency JAXA announced this Friday, January 19, that its SLIM space module successfully landed on the lunar surface, but warned that the ship is having problems generating energy due to failures in its solar panels. Scientists rushed to transfer data from SLIM to Earth, since due to these problems the probe now depends only on its battery, which lasts “a few hours.”
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The Japanese SLIM probe It touched the lunar surface at 00:20 local Japanese time on Saturday, January 20 (15:20 GMT on Friday the 19th) after a descent of 20 minutes.
The moon landing was originally notified by the Japanese aerospace agency (JAXA), who, however, asked for time to specify the status of the probe.
Source: Jaxa Agency
The agency later reported that it had temporarily lost contact with the probe and that its solar panels were not generating power.
Hitoshi Kuninaka, director of the aerospace agency's research center, said at a news conference that due to the failure they have given priority to transferring data from SLIM to Earth, because The probe depends solely on its battery, which will last “a few hours” despite measures “to keep it operational”, such as turning off its heater.
It is the smallest aircraft that has touched the lunar soil so far. The lander is the size of a single-passenger vehicle, while the probe, which is spherical in shape, is the same size as a tennis ball.
The moon landing took approximately half an hour, due to the different maneuvers planned to complete it. The descent began at midnight on Saturday, when the spacecraft was about 10 kilometers from the lunar surface. It became vertical five kilometers from the target landing area, and at about 50 meters it was to begin parallel movements to begin searching for a safe point to make contact with the lunar bed.
SLIM (Intelligent Landing for Lunar Research) makes Japan the fifth country to have successfully landed on the moon, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India, after several unsuccessful attempts.
In 2022, Japan was part of the failed American Artemis 1 mission, to which the Omotenashi probe was docked, and, in 2023, the private Japanese company Ispace tried unsuccessfully to become the first individual to reach the moon, but a violent landing caused him to lose contact with the sent ship.
Sniper precision
The unmanned operation was developed by the JAXA agency together with a toy company, Takara Tomy, and has been distinguished by the precision with which it calculated its landing on the moon.
Not in vain, the ship is nicknamed Moon Sniper, lunar sniper in English, because unlike the usual landing areas, which can cover kilometers of surface, this probe is restricted to a radius of 100 meters with respect to the designated reference point.
The flight plan called for the device to land in a crater, from where it could have access to the mantle and the inner layer of the moon.
It is not the first time that the agency has achieved a precision landing on a celestial bodybut the challenge on the moon was made more complicated by the difference in gravity.
The agency indicated that it will have to wait about a month to verify whether the projected precision objectives were met.
Very varied objectives
If it remains operational, SLIM will have the mission of gathering information about the little-explored south pole of the moon, collecting stones that could help explain the origin of both the satellite and the Earth itself and, among other objectives, answering the doubt about the existence of water in this celestial body.
A special camera will analyze minerals, including volcanic stone, which makes up the bed of the Shioli crater, where the moon landing was planned.
But apart from the exploration itself, the fundamental task of SLIM will be to test precision landing technology, which will allow future missions to be designed in a much more detailed way.
With AP, Reuters and AFP
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