(Tokyo) Le petit engin spatial japonais SLIM a honoré son surnom de « Moon Sniper » : il s’est posé samedi dernier sur la Lune à 55 mètres de sa cible, soit un très haut degré de précision, a annoncé jeudi l’agence spatiale japonaise (Jaxa).
L’objectif de faire alunir ce module dans un rayon de 100 mètres par rapport à sa cible, comparé à plusieurs kilomètres en général pour les missions lunaires, a ainsi été atteint.
« SLIM a réussi à se poser en douceur et avec une haute précision […]the distance of its landing point from the target was confirmed to be 55 meters,” Jaxa said.
The module could even have landed with even greater precision without a motor problem in the last tens of meters of its descent, which could have slightly separated it from its target, estimated Thursday Shinichiro Sakai, head of the SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon).
Jaxa also published Thursday the first images of this historic moon landing for Japan, which has become the fifth country in the world to successfully land on the Earth’s natural satellite after the United States, the USSR, China and the India.
One of these photos, in color, shows the small SLIM module (2.4 m long, 1.7 m wide and 2.7 m high) visibly intact and placed with a slight inclination on rocky lunar soil. .
But the Japanese feat was accompanied by a downside: SLIM was not able to use its solar panels immediately after its moon landing, which forced Jaxa to cut off its power supply less than three hours later, to save its batteries in for a possible restart.
A relaunch of SLIM soon attempted
Jaxa still hopes to be able to turn SLIM back on when the angle of the Sun has changed in the area of its landing, allowing solar rays to reach its photovoltaic panels.
“Based on our current estimates, we are preparing to restart probe operations by 1er February,” Jaxa said on Thursday.
SLIM landed in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli. Before being turned off, the machine was able to land its two mini-rovers normally, supposed to carry out analyzes of rocks coming from the internal structure of the Moon (the lunar mantle), which is still very poorly understood.
One of these two rovers is a spherical probe called SORA-Q, barely larger than a tennis ball, capable of modifying its shape to move on the lunar surface. It was developed by Jaxa, in partnership with the Japanese toy giant Takara Tomy.
More than 50 years after the first human steps on the Moon – taken by the Americans in 1969 – the Earth’s natural satellite has once again become the subject of a global race.
The American Artemis program plans to send astronauts back to the Moon, a project recently postponed to September 2026, with in the longer term the construction of a permanent base on site. China has similar competing plans.
Japan’s first two moon landing attempts went wrong. In 2022, a Jaxa probe, Omotenashi, on board the American Artemis 1 mission, experienced a fatal battery failure shortly after its ejection into space.
And last year, a lander from the young private Japanese company ispace crashed on the surface of the Moon, having missed the crucial step of gentle descent.
Reaching the Moon remains an immense technological challenge, even for the major space powers: the private American company Astrobotic, under contract with NASA, also failed at the beginning of January to land its first spacecraft on the Moon.