2023-12-25 21:24:48
A Japanese lunar lander entered the orbit of the Moon on Monday, the Japanese space agency announced, before its attempt to land on the surface of the star planned for next month, which would be a first for the country .
The Japanese Space Agency (Jaxa) “is pleased to announce that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) was successfully inserted into the lunar orbit at 4:51 p.m. Japan time (7:51 GMT) on Monday, a Jaxa said in a statement.
“The descent towards the Moon will begin around 0:00 a.m. Japanese time on January 20” and the moon landing is scheduled for approximately 20 minutes later, Jaxa added.
The Japanese rocket carrying the small SLIM lunar module, nicknamed “Moon Sniper”, took off in September from the archipelago under the eyes of more than 35,000 people on YouTube.
If the module succeeds in its mission thanks to high-precision lunar landing technology, at a maximum of 100 meters from its target compared to several kilometers usually, it will be an “unprecedented” feat, Jaxa commented at the beginning of the month. .
“The results should be used in international space exploration programs currently under study,” she added.
A Japanese astronaut might also set foot on lunar soil for the very first time, in 2025 at the earliest, as part of the United States’ Artemis manned missions, the Kyodo agency reported on Sunday.
Last August, India succeeded in landing its first spacecraft on the Moon. Before her, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China had already achieved such a feat.
Russia, for its part, failed in a new attempt, its Luna-25 probe having crashed in August on the lunar soil.
A combined moon landing of the SLIM module would be a welcome success for Jaxa, which has suffered a series of failures since last year.
Japan had already attempted in November 2022 to place a mini-probe on the Moon, embarked aboard the American Artemis 1 mission. But communication with “Omotenashi” (“hospitality” in Japanese) was lost shortly following the ejection. of this probe in space, due to a failure of its batteries.
And in April this year, a young private Japanese company, ispace, failed to land its lunar module which probably crashed on the surface of the Earth’s natural satellite.
Jaxa, for its part, experienced a failure shortly following the takeoff of a small launcher in October 2022, Epsilon-6, then experienced two other successive setbacks in early 2023 with its large new generation H3 rocket, which still hasn’t succeeded in a first mission.
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