(Tokyo) Japan on Saturday became the fifth country to have successfully landed on the Moon, but its module risks soon running out of energy due to a problem with its solar panels.
After a breathtaking 20-minute descent, the Japanese space agency JAXA announced that the module SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) had landed at 12:20 a.m. Saturday (Friday 10:20 a.m. Eastern) and communication with it had been established.
But due to a lack of working solar panels, the machine nicknamed “Moon Sniper” for its ability to land with precision will only have electricity for “several hours,” warned Hitoshi Kuninaka, one of those responsible for the JAXA.
It is possible that the panels will work again when the angle of the sun changes, he said, as the team works to maximize the mission’s scientific results by transmitting the resulting data back to Earth.
“It is unlikely that the solar panels failed. It is possible that they will not be oriented in the direction initially planned,” he said during a press conference.
“If the descent had not been successful, the probe would have crashed at a very high speed. If this were the case, all its functionality would be lost,” he noted. “But data is sent to Earth.”
SLIM is one of the many lunar missions launched recently by countries and private companies. But so far, only the United States, the Soviet Union, China and more recently India have succeeded in landing on the Moon.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida described the moon landing as “very welcome news”, while saying he was aware that “detailed analyses” on the condition of the solar panels were necessary.
The head of NASA, the American space agency, Bill Nelson, sent his “congratulations [au Japon] became the fifth country in history to successfully land on the Moon.
” Big success ”
JAXA hopes to analyze the data acquired during the moon landing to determine whether the craft achieved its goal of landing within 100 meters of its target.
SLIM landed in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli, from where it was to carry out analyzes on the ground.
The two mini-rovers carried SLIM were released normally, JAXA said, including a spherical probe called SORA-Q, barely larger than a tennis ball, and capable of modifying its shape to move on the lunar surface. It was developed by JAXA, in partnership with Japanese toy giant Takara Tomy.
Although the accuracy of the moon landing must be confirmed, “I think the mission is a great success,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Several problems could potentially be at the origin of the problem with solar panels, he explained to AFP. “A loose cable, a cable connected the wrong way, or the lander could be upside down and unable to see the sun for whatever reason,” McDowell suggested.
Technological challenge
More than 50 years after the first steps by humans on the Moon – the Americans in 1969 – it has once again become the subject of a global race.
In addition to the United States and China, Russia also dreams of reconnecting with the space glory of the USSR, by partnering in particular with China and India, which made its first moon landing last summer.
Japan’s first two attempts to land on the moon went wrong.
In 2022, the probe Omotenashiembarked on board the American Artemis 1 mission, experienced a fatal failure of its batteries shortly after its ejection into space.
And in April 2023, a lunar lander from the young private Japanese company ispace crashed on the surface of the Moon, having missed the gentle descent stage.
Reaching the Moon remains an immense technological challenge, even for the major space powers: the private American company Astrobotic, under contract with NASA, announced Thursday that its Peregrine lander had been deliberately destroyed, probably disintegrated upon re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere before achieving its objective.
NASA also postponed the next two missions of its major return to the Moon program for almost a year, Artemisto September 2025 and September 2026.