A Japanese mini-spaceship is scheduled to land on the Moon on the night between Friday, January 19, and Saturday, January 20, 2024, Japanese time. It would be great news for the country that dreams of imitating the United States, the USSR, China and India.
The descent towards the Moon of the SLIM module (Intelligent lander to investigate the Moon) is expected to begin around midnight Saturday Japan time (Friday 3pm GMT) and should last about 20 minutes, according to the Japanese space agency Jaxa.
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Moon landing, 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 a high degree of precision, within a radius of 100 meters from his target. Hence his nickname “Moon Sniper”.
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It is common for lunar ships to land several kilometers from their target, which can complicate their exploration missions. Landing exactly on the Moon is more difficult than on asteroids – a feat already achieved in Jaxa – because the gravity on the Moon is stronger than on small celestial bodies, and a craft therefore only has one chance to successfully reach the moon. landing.
SLIM is to land in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter called Shioli (“bookmarks” in Japanese), from where the machine should be able to carry out ground analysis of rocks thought to come from the lunar mantle, the internal structure of the Earth’s natural satellite, which is still little known.
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As a partner, a toy manufacturer
These rocks “they are crucial for research into the origin of the Moon and Earth”Tomokatsu Morota, a professor at the University of Tokyo specializing in space exploration, points out to AFP.
SLIM carries a strange spherical probe slightly larger than a tennis ball, and capable of changing its shape to move on the lunar surface. It was developed by Jaxa, in collaboration with Japanese toy giant Takara Tomy.
Jaxa has also put a video game online to better explain the problems of SLIM. This Japanese mission also aims to advance water resources research on the Moon, a key issue as the United States and China plan to set up populated bases there.
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The presence of water ice on the bottom of craters in the polar regions of the Moon has been demonstrated, which is therefore now attracting attention.
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The permanent challenge of the “Moon Objective”
The success of the SLIM mission would enable Japan “show your presence” in the space field, Morota also recalls. More than fifty years after the first steps of man on the Moon, by the Americans in 1969, it has once again become the object 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 reconnecting with the space glory of the USSR, collaborating in particular with China or India, which last summer managed to achieve its first Moon Landing. Japan’s first two moon landing attempts went badly.
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In 2022, a Jaxa mini-probe, Omotenashi (“hospitality” in Japanese), that was aboard the American Artemis 1 mission, suffered a fatal battery failure shortly after its ejection into space. And in April 2023, a lander from the young Japanese private company ispace crashed onto the surface of the Moon, after having failed the smooth descent phase.
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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, under contract with NASA, had to give up attempting to land on the Moon due to a fuel leak from his machinery. , which should now burn upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
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NASA also postponed the next two missions of its grand return to the Moon Artemis program by nearly a year, to September 2025 and September 2026.
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2024-01-17 11:19:29
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