Tokyo:
Japan on Thursday launched a lunar exploration spacecraft on a domestic H-IIA rocket, expected to become the fifth country in the world to land on the moon early next year.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the rocket took off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan as planned and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM). The program had to be postponed three times in a week last month due to adverse weather.
Known as the “Moon Sniper,” Japan aims to land the SLIM within 100 meters of its target site on the lunar surface. The $100 million mission is expected to begin landing by February following a long, fuel-efficient approach trajectory.
“The larger objective of SLIM is to prove high-accuracy landing…landing where we want to” on the lunar surface rather than ‘landing where we can,’ JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa said at a news conference. ‘To achieve.’
Hours after launch on Thursday, JAXA said it had received signals from SLIM that showed it was operating normally.
The launch comes two weeks after India became the fourth country to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the moon’s uncharted south pole. Around the same time, Russia’s Luna-25 lander crashed while approaching the Moon.
Also read: Mission completed, India puts the rover sent to the Moon to sleep
Japan’s first two attempts to land on the moon last year failed. JAXA lost contact with the OMOTENASHI lander and a landing attempt in November failed. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, built by Japanese startup iSpace (9348.T), crashed while attempting to land on the moon’s surface in April.
SLIM is set to touch down near the moon’s nearest part, Mare Nectaris, a lunar ocean that appears as a dark spot when viewed from Earth. Its primary goal is to test advanced optical and image processing technology.
After landing, the probe aims to analyze the composition of olivine rocks near the sites in search of clues about the Moon’s origin. No lunar rover has been loaded onto SLIM.
Thursday’s H-IIA rocket also carried the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency. The satellite’s goal is to observe plasma winds flowing through the universe, which scientists believe are important to help understand the evolution of stars and galaxies.
Ground stations in Hawaii and Japan received signals from XRISM shortly after launch, JAXA said, confirming that the satellite’s solar panels had successfully deployed.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.T) built the H-IIA rocket and conducted the launch, which was the 47th H-IIA launched by Japan since 2001, bringing the vehicle’s success rate close to 98%.
Thursday’s H-IIA rocket also carried the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite. Photo: Reuters
JAXA suspended the launch of the H-IIA carrying SLIM for several months while it investigated the failure of its new medium-lift H3 rocket during its launch in March. Japan plans to retire the H-IIA after its 50th launch in 2024.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in a social media post after Thursday’s launch that developing the major rocket is essential for Japan’s independent space activities.
“We will increase momentum toward the successful relaunch of the H3 rocket,” Kishida posted on social media X, formerly known as Twitter.
Japan’s space missions have suffered other recent setbacks, including the launch failure of an Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test in July.
JAXA plans a joint Lunar Polar Exploration mission (LUPEX) with the Indian Space Research Organization after 2025, in which Japan’s H3 rocket will carry India’s next lunar lander into space.
The country also aims to send an astronaut to the lunar surface in the late 2020s as part of NASA’s Artemis program.
