Japan launches lunar mission after three postponements in August – 9/6/2023 – Science

Japan finally managed to launch the H-IIA rocket that carries the lunar module of the country’s space agency, on Thursday morning (7) — Wednesday night (6), at Brasilia time. Last month, the launch had to be postponed three times because of unfavorable weather conditions.

Japan’s space agency, Jaxa, said the rocket lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan as planned. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries manufactured the rocket and operated the launch.

The rocket is carrying Jaxa’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) spacecraft, dubbed the “moon slinger” for its experimental precision landing technology. Slim’s lunar landing is scheduled for early next year.

The ship’s name also plays with the term “slim”, thin in English, as it is a small mission: 590 kg in all, two thirds of which are fuel.

The abbreviation “Slim” also hints at the project’s central objective, which is to test automated techniques for performing a high-precision landing on the lunar surface. All landings to date on the Moon, Mars, or another celestial body have had low accuracy.

Slim intends to have an expected accuracy of around one hundred meters, which would make it possible to explore more challenging and scientifically interesting locations, without having to worry so much about nearby geographic features that could jeopardize the mission. The plan is a descent into the Shioli crater, in Mare Nectaris, close to the lunar equator, on the face that always remains facing the Earth. This, however, will take time.

The launch comes two weeks after India became the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the lunar south pole.

Two previous attempts by Japan to land on the moon have failed in the last year. JAXA lost contact with a lunar module carried by a NASA rocket and canceled a landing attempt in November. A lunar module made by Japanese startup ispace crashed in April while trying to land on the lunar surface.

In the case of ispace, a landing module called Hakuto-R was launched in December last year. The modest vehicle successfully carried out all stages of the flight to the Moon, going there on a low-energy trajectory, which consumed months in space. But in the last seconds before consummating the landing, a conflict between the sensors and the onboard computer caused the fuel to run out before the probe touched down, and it crashed to the ground at high speed. Otherwise, Japan would be the fourth country to land on the moon, not India.

The current mission that has just been launched, however, is conducted not by a company, but by the Japanese space agency itself.