2024-01-19 22:22:00
Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported that Japan’s lunar probe ‘SLIM’ reached the lunar surface on the 20th. However, it is pointed out that it is difficult to consider it a complete success due to problems with solar cells not working properly.
According to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Slim descended from an altitude of regarding 15 km around midnight on this day toward a crater near the equator on the front side of the moon. After Slim’s altitude was displayed as 0m at around 0:20, JAXA held a press conference at 2:10 and announced that it had confirmed the landing.
With this, Japan became the fifth country in the world to successfully land on the moon, following the former Soviet Union, the United States, China, and India.
However, at this point, the solar cells installed in Slim are not producing power, so it is running on batteries, JAXA said.
A JAXA official said at a press conference, “The probe succeeded in making a soft landing on the lunar surface,” and added, “Communication is working well, but the solar cell power generation is not working, so we are continuing to analyze the situation.”
The key is whether Slim has succeeded in ‘pinpoint landing’, which suppresses the error regarding the target landing point to within 100m. It is known that water and ice exist locally on the moon, so precise landing at the destination is important. JAXA plans to interpret the data and determine the precision of the landing in regarding a month.
The small lunar probe Slim is 2.4m high and weighs 200km and was launched on September 7th from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture (?) aboard the ‘H2A’ rocket. Slim, designed with a landing error of less than 100m, is also nicknamed ‘Moon Sniper’, meaning a precise lunar landing.
JAXA expects Slim, with its precision landing capabilities, to be a tool for exploring the moon’s hilly polar regions, which are considered potential sources of oxygen, fuel and water.
Landing on the moon is believed to be much more difficult than landing on any other asteroid. This is because gravity, which is regarding one-sixth that of the Earth, acts on it.
Last year, Japanese startup iSpace’s lunar probe crashed on the lunar surface, and Russia’s Luna 25 also crashed while attempting to land on the moon. Last week, American startup Astrobotic’s lunar lander also abandoned its attempt to land on the moon due to a fuel leak.
(Seoul = News 1)
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