2024-01-20 06:40:23
Congratulations from NASA
“It is unlikely that the solar panels failed. It is possible that they will not be oriented in the direction initially planned,” he said during a press conference. “If the descent had not been successful, it would have crashed at a very high speed. If this were the case, all the functionality of the probe would be lost,” he noted. “But data is sent to Earth.”
An illustration representing the SLIM lander. — © JAXA HANDOUT / keystone-sda.ch
SLIM is one of many lunar missions launched recently by countries and private companies. But so far, only the United States, the Soviet Union, China and more recently India have succeeded in landing on the Moon.
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The head of NASA, the American space agency, Bill Nelson, sent his “congratulations (to Japan) becoming the fifth country in history to successfully land on the Moon”. “We value our partnership in the cosmos and our ongoing collaboration,” he added.
Jaxa hopes to analyze the data acquired during the moon landing to determine whether the craft achieved its objective of landing within 100 meters of its target. SLIM landed in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli, from where it was to carry out analyzes on the ground.
Reaching the Moon remains a huge technological challenge
Read also: An American moon lander has disappeared into the Earth’s atmosphere
More than 50 years after the first steps by humans on the Moon – the Americans in 1969 – it has once again become the subject of a global race. In addition to the United States and China, Russia also dreams of reconnecting with the space glory of the USSR, by joining forces in particular with China and India, which made its first moon landing last summer. Japan’s first two attempts to land on the moon went wrong.
In 2022, a Jaxa probe, Omotenashi, on board the American Artemis 1 mission, experienced a fatal battery failure shortly after its ejection into space. And in April 2023, a lunar lander from the young private Japanese company ispace crashed on the surface of the Moon, having missed the gentle descent stage.
Reaching the Moon remains an immense technological challenge, even for the major space powers: the private American company Astrobotic, under contract with NASA, announced Thursday that its Peregrine lander had been deliberately destroyed, probably disintegrated upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere before achieving its objective. NASA also postponed by almost a year the next two missions of its major return to the Moon program, Artemis, to September 2025 and September 2026.
Read also: Sending ashes of deceased people to the Moon angers Navajos
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