2023-08-25 14:30:47
A Japanese rocket is due to take off on Monday carrying a small module to land on the Moon within four to six months, a new attempt following unsuccessful Japanese tests, while India has just succeeded in its first moon landing.
The take-off was initially scheduled for Saturday, then had been postponed to Sunday and now to Monday due to bad weather conditions expected this weekend at the launch site of the Japanese space agency (Jaxa) in Tanegashima (south-west of the country).
The project consists in particular in testing a high-precision moon landing technology, at a maximum of 100 meters from its target once morest several kilometers usually, with a small and light probe (700-730 kg).
Hence the name of this module, SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon), and its nickname of “Moon Sniper”.
Presentation of the SLIM or “Moon Sniper” module of the Japanese lunar mission launched in August 2023
AFP
For mobile exploration robots, “navigating steep slopes and uneven terrain still represents a high level of difficulty. This is why it is important to succeed in landing (spacecraft, editor’s note) with high precision to allow a efficient exploration in the future,” explained Jaxa on its site.
In addition, the areas suitable for exploring the polar regions of the Moon “are limited to a very small area”, still notes the Jaxa.
In the event of a successful landing, SLIM will also have to carry out, using a multispectral camera, analyzes of the composition of rocks supposed to come from the lunar mantle, the internal structure of the Moon which is still very poorly understood.
The global race to explore the Moon is heating up following India successfully landed a spacecraft there on Wednesday; before it, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China had already successfully landed on the moon.
Russia has just failed in a new attempt, its Luna-25 probe having crashed on Saturday August 19 on the lunar soil.
several failures
Japan had already tried last November to land a mini-probe on the Moon which had been embarked on board the American mission Artemis 1. But communication with “Omotenashi” (“hospitality” in Japanese) had been lost shortly following its arrival. ejection into space, due to a failure of its batteries.
Undated photo released by Japanese start-up ispace on April 25, 2023 of the Moon taken by a camera mounted on the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander in lunar orbit
ispace/AFP/Archives
And in April this year, a young private Japanese company, ispace, failed to land its Hakuto-R module, which probably crashed on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite.
“Moon landings remain a very difficult technology” to master, SLIM project manager Shinichiro Sakai told reporters on Thursday, expressing his respect for the success of the Indian mission.
The Jaxa H2-A rocket, which is due to take off Monday at 9:26 a.m. Japanese time (00:26 GMT), must also take a satellite called XRISM, an X-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission, into space.
The XRISM mission is the result of a collaboration between Jaxa, the American NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
“X-ray astronomy allows us to study the most energetic phenomena in the Universe. It holds the key to answering important questions in modern astrophysics: how the largest structures in the Universe evolve, how the matter of which we are ultimately composed was distributed throughout the cosmos, and how galaxies are shaped by massive black holes at their center,” explained Matteo Guainazzi, ESA project scientist for XRISM.
History of missions to the Moon, by country
AFP
Jaxa must also bounce back with the dual SLIM/XRISM mission, because the space agency has experienced several resounding failures since last year.
After the failure of its small-sized Epsilon-6 launcher shortly following take-off last October, Jaxa indeed suffered two further setbacks in February and March of this year with its next-generation H3 launcher, which has still not failed a first mission.
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