Qualified Success for Japan’s Moon Landing

Akihabara News (Tokyo) — The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) declared success in its “main mission” of conducting a Moon landing near the targeted coordinates, but it was hardly an unqualified triumph.

The unmanned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed on the lunar surface on January 20, 2024, making Japan only the fifth nation to land a vehicle on the Moon.

However, JAXA admitted that “at an altitude of 50 meters just prior to the start of the obstacle avoidance maneuver, the thrust from one of the two main engines was most likely lost” for unclear reasons. This caused the vehicle to slide away from its target zone, tilt in an unforeseen direction, and most likely tumble on the ground when it landed.

The most serious consequence of this ungraceful landing is that SLIM came to rest rolled on its head, positioned so that its solar panels couldn’t collect energy to power the craft. This meant that once the batteries ran out of juice, SLIM needed to be prematurely powered down.

Still, JAXA noted that “all technical data on the navigation guidance leading to the landing, and navigation camera image data captured during the descent and on the lunar surface that are necessary for future pinpoint landing technology, were obtained from the spacecraft. The small probes were successfully separated just prior to landing in this contingency situation. The multi-band spectroscopic camera onboard SLIM was also operated on a trial basis and captured images until the power was turned off.”

SLIM’s qualified success is a morale booster for Japan’s space program, which has recently been suffering a series of mishaps while Asian competitors have been moving ahead.

The Soviet Union and the United States both conducted their first successful soft landings on the Moon in 1966, but they have more recently been followed by China (2013), India (2023), and now Japan.

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