A Japanese mini spacecraft must land on the moon on the night of Friday, January 19 to Saturday, January 20, 2024 Japan time, which would be a great first for the country that dreams of becoming the United States, the USSR , China and India to emulate.
The descent of the SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) module to the moon is scheduled to begin around midnight on Saturday Japan time (Friday, 3:00 p.m. GMT) and last about 20 minutes, according to the Japanese space agency Jaxa.
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Landing on the moon is a difficult task
This small unmanned spacecraft (2.4 m long, 1.7 m wide and 2.7 m high) must not only land on the moon, but also land with high precision within a 100 meter radius of its target. Hence his nickname “Moon Sniper”.
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It is common for lunar vehicles to land several kilometers away from their destination, which can complicate their exploration missions. A precise landing on the moon is more difficult than on asteroids – a feat that Jaxa, among others, has already achieved – because the gravity on the moon is stronger than on small celestial bodies and a spacecraft therefore only has a single chance to successfully land on the moon create landing.
SLIM must land in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter called Shioli (“bookmark” in Japanese), from where the machine should be able to carry out ground-level analyzes of rocks said to be from the lunar mantle, the internal structure, come from the Earth's natural satellite, which is still very poorly understood.
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A toy manufacturer as a partner
These rocks “are crucial for studying the origins of the Moon and Earth,” Tomokatsu Morota, a lecturer at the University of Tokyo who specializes in space research, told AFP.
SLIM carries a strange spherical probe barely larger than a tennis ball that can change shape to move around the lunar surface. It was developed by Jaxa in collaboration with Takara Tomy, a Japanese toy giant.
Jaxa has also put a video game online to better explain SLIM's problems. This Japanese mission also aims to advance exploration of water resources on the Moon, a key issue as the United States and China ultimately intend to establish inhabited bases there.
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The presence of water ice has been detected at the bottom of craters in the moon's polar regions, which is now attracting attention.
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The permanent challenge of the “lunar goal”
The success of the SLIM mission would allow Japan to “show its presence in the space domain,” Mr. Morota also recalled. More than fifty years after man's first steps on the moon by Americans in 1969, it has once again become the subject of a global race in which the rivalry between the United States and China plays a central role.
But many other countries and private companies are also interested, such as Russia, which dreams of regaining the space glory of the USSR through a partnership, particularly with China or India, which was successful last summer. most recently his first moon landing. Japan's first two attempts to land on the moon failed.
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In 2022, a Jaxa mini-probe called Omotenashi (“Hospitality” in Japanese), which was aboard the American Artemis-1 mission, experienced a fatal battery failure shortly after it was ejected into space. And in April 2023, a lander from the young private Japanese company ispace crashed on the lunar surface after failing the soft descent.
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Reaching the moon remains an immense technological challenge even for the major space powers: at the beginning of January, the private American company Astrobotic, commissioned by NASA, had to abandon its attempt to land on the moon due to a fuel leak in its machine. which is now supposed to burn up when it re-enters the earth's atmosphere.
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NASA has also postponed the next two missions of its major return program to the moon Artemis by almost a year to September 2025 and September 2026.
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