Japan yesterday became the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, but said its “Moon Sniper” spacecraft was running out of power due to a solar battery problem.
After a nail-biting 20-minute descent, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had touched down and communication had been established.
Without the solar cells functioning, Institute for Space and Astronautical Science director general Hitoshi Kuninaka said the craft — dubbed “Moon Sniper” for its precision technology — would only have power for “several hours.”
Photo: Reuters
SLIM is one of several new lunar missions launched by governments and private firms, 50 years after the first human moon landing.
Crash landings and communication failures are rife, and only four other countries have made it to the moon: the US, the Soviet Union, China and, most recently, India.
As mission control prioritized gathering data while they could, Kuninaka suggested that the batteries might work again once the angle of the sun changed.
“It’s possible that it is not facing in the originally planned direction,” he told an early-hours news conference.
“If the descent was not successful, it would have crashed at a very high speed. If that were the case, all functionality of the probe would be lost,” he said. “But data is being sent to Earth.”
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called the landing “very welcome news,” but said he was aware that more “detailed analysis” on the solar cells was needed.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson congratulated Japan in a message on X “on being the historic fifth country to land successfully on the Moon.”
JAXA said it hopes to analyze data acquired during the landing, which would help determine whether the craft landed within 100m of its intended spot.
SLIM was aiming for a crater where the moon’s mantle, the usually deep inner layer beneath its crust, is believed to be exposed on the surface.
Two probes detached successfully — one with a transmitter and another designed to trundle around the lunar surface beaming images to Earth, JAXA said.
Although the accuracy of the touchdown needs to be verified, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell said that “the mission is a big success.”
Several things could have caused the solar panel problem, he said.
“A wire came loose, a wire was connected the wrong way, or the lander is upside down and can’t see the sun for some reason,” McDowell said.
The scientist added that “hopefully” JAXA had been able to download images from the landing, but an experiment to study the composition of moon rocks might be a lost cause.
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