Japan’s ‘Moon Sniper’ vehicle landed about 55 metres (180 feet) from its target, the country’s space agency said Thursday, as it released the mission’s first photographs.
The autonomous Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM), commonly referred to as the ‘Moon Sniper’ due to its pinpoint technology, was designed to land within 100 metres (330 ft) of a designated landing site. This is far more precise than the standard landing zone of several kilometres.
The space agency JAXA stated, “SLIM succeeded in a pin-point soft landing… the landing point is confirmed to be 55 metres away from the target point”.
Japan became only the fifth country to make a soft lunar landing on Saturday, following the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India.
However, celebrations were dampened due to a problem with the lightweight spacecraft’s solar batteries, which were not producing power.
JAXA chose to turn off the craft with 12 percent power remaining, allowing for a possible recovery when the sun’s angle changes.
Earlier this week, JAXA noted, “If sunlight hits the Moon from the west in the future, we believe there’s a possibility of power generation, and we’re currently preparing for restoration”.
Before turning off SLIM, mission control was able to obtain technical and photographic data from the craft’s fall and the lunar surface.
On Thursday, JAXA released the mission’s first colour photographs, which show the SLIM craft sitting intact at a slight angle on the rocky grey surface, with lunar slopes rising in the background.
The mission was aimed at a crater where the Moon’s mantle, the deep interior layer under its crust, is thought to be visible on the surface.
By examining the rocks there, JAXA intends to shed light on the enigma of the Moon’s potential water resources, which may be used to create facilities there as stopovers on the way to Mars.
On Saturday, two probes successfully departed from SLIM: one with a transmitter and another designed to trundle across the lunar surface, transmitting photographs back to Earth.
This shape-shifting mini-rover, which is slightly larger than a tennis ball, was co-developed by the company behind the Transformer toys and captured the image shared by JAXA on Thursday.
SLIM is one of several recent lunar missions by government and private companies, 50 years after the first human Moon landing.
But technological issues abound, and the United States suffered two setbacks this month in its ambitious Moon projects.
Two previous Japanese lunar missions, one official and one private, had also failed.
In 2022, the government attempted to send a lunar probe dubbed Omotenashi as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission but failed.
In April, Japanese firm Ispace failed to become the first private corporation to land on the Moon, losing touch with its spacecraft after what it characterized as a hard landing.
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