The Japanese Moon Sniper Probe lands on the Moon with unprecedented accuracy

Published on: 01/19/2024 – 5:37 PMModified: 01/19/2024 – 7:22 pm

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Mission to Japan successful. Its Slim Space Module succeeded in its attempt to land on the moon with unmatched precision on the night of Friday January 19 to Saturday January 20, the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) announced, but its solar cells did not generate power.

The Slim Module (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon), which has been orbiting the rocky star since late December, began its descent about twenty minutes earlier at a speed of about 1,700 meters per second.

Based on the telemetry data, “It seems that Slim has landed. We are checking its status,” Shin Toriumi, a Jaxa official, said during the live broadcast.

This small unmanned spacecraft (2.4 m long, 1.7 m wide and 2.7 m high) was not only to land on the Moon, but also to land within a radius of 100 m from its target, a radius considered high precision. Hence his nickname “Moon Sniper”.

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“A huge technological advance”

It is common for lunar vehicles to land several kilometers away from their target, which can complicate their exploration missions. And landing on the Moon is more difficult than landing on asteroids — a feat that has already been achieved, including Jaxa — because the Moon’s gravity is stronger than on smaller celestial bodies.

Emily Brunsdon, director of the University of York’s Astrocampus, explained that an accurate landing on the moon for Slim is a “huge challenge”.

Moon Sniper’s accuracy “is a huge technological advance that will enable the design of missions aimed at answering more specific research questions.”

But achieving this feat is “exceptionally technically difficult”. “There’s usually only one chance, so even the slightest mistake can result in mission failure,” she warns.

The slim module was supposed to land in a small crater, less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli, from where the machine should be able to analyze the ground for rocks believed to come from the Moon’s mantle, the interior of Earth’s natural satellite. , which is still very poorly known.

These rocks are “crucial for the study of the origin of the Moon and the Earth”, underlines Tomokatsu Morota, a lecturer at the University of Tokyo, an expert in space exploration.

Advancing research on water resources

Slim has a spherical probe barely larger than a tennis ball, capable of changing its shape to move across the surface of the Moon. It was developed by Jaxa in partnership with Japanese toy giant Takara Tomy.

The Japanese mission also aims to advance research on lunar water resources, a key issue as the United States and China eventually seek to establish inhabited bases there.

The presence of water ice at the bottom of craters in the lunar polar regions is now attracting attention.

The success of the SLIM mission would allow Japan to “show its presence” in the space domain, Tomokatsu Morota also recalled.

More than 50 years after the first man’s steps on the moon by the Americans in 1969, it has once again become the subject of a global race, with the rivalry between the United States and China playing a central role.

But many other countries and private companies are also interested, such as Russia, which dreams of reuniting with the space glory of the USSR, especially by partnering with China or India, which succeeded last summer. Finally his first moon landing took place.

Japan’s progress in space conquest

Japan’s first two lunar landing attempts failed. In 2022, the JAXA mini-probe, Omotenashi (“hospitality” in Japanese), on board the American Artemis 1 mission experienced a fatal battery failure shortly after its ejection into space.

And in April 2023, a lander from the young private Japanese company Espace crashed on the lunar surface, failing the simple descent stage.

Reaching the moon is also a huge technological challenge for the major space powers: the private American company Astrobotic, under contract to NASA, announced Thursday that its Peregrine lander had been intentionally lost, possibly disintegrating without re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. objective

NASA has also postponed the next two return missions in its Moon Artemis program by about a year, to September 2025 and September 2026.

with AFP