Japan reaches the Moon, but it is not yet known whether the landing was successful; follow live – 01/19/2024 – Mensageiro Sideral

Japan arrived on the Moon, this Friday (19). But, shortly after the moment in which the Slim module, from Jaxa (Japanese space agency), would have reached the ground, at around 12:20 pm (Brasília time), there was no confirmation of a successful landing. The landing narration stated that the status was being confirmed.

After almost 10 minutes, they interrupted the transmission and informed that there would be, later (without defining a time), a press conference. So far, there is no confirmation on the status of the module.

The most concrete information we have so far does not come from Jaxa. The Bochum radio observatory, in Germany, says it is capturing signals transmitted by a small vehicle that was carried by Slim, the Lev-1 (Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1), which was released from the module before landing. They also appear to have picked up signals from Slim himself, which would indicate that they both survived the descent. But it is not clear at what operational level.

Japan’s goal is to become the 5th country to land on the Moon.

Follow live with Mensageiro Sideral (with the uncertainty, the transmission will resume soon).

The feat could place Japan alongside a select group made up of Russia, the USA, China and India.

The small spacecraft, just 2.7 meters long and 200 kg, will leave a perilunium orbit (closest point to the lunar surface) of 15 km. Processing images produced by a camera pointed downwards and identifying craters previously mapped by the Japanese Kaguya orbital probe, which scanned the lunar surface between 2007 and 2009, the vehicle must descend close to the Shioli crater, in the lunar equatorial region.

Slim is an acronym for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon. The main objective of the mission, which cost US$120 million, is to land and, preferably, demonstrate precision landing capabilities within a radius a maximum of 100 meters from the target, and on terrain that is not very hospitable, with an incline of around 15 degrees.

The level of accuracy surpasses any other unmanned lunar or planetary mission ever conducted (only on asteroids, with very low gravity, have there been high-precision unmanned landings). In general, the landing site of a spacecraft is designated by an ellipse (something like a stretched circle), which can be larger or smaller according to uncertainties in the path from orbit to the surface.

To give an idea of ​​the ambition, the landing ellipse of Apollo 11, the mission that took humans to the lunar soil for the first time, in July 1969, was 20 km long by 5 km wide. In other words, the ship could land at any point in this vast area while still fulfilling its objective.

Things changed for Apollo 12, which came down just 200 meters from the Surveyor-3 probe – but then piloted by a human. For unmanned flights, uncertainty about the landing location hasn’t changed much since then. In 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover descended to Jezero Crater, on the surface of Mars, aiming for a landing ellipse measuring 7.7 km by 6.6 km (the NASA vehicle ended up descending 1 km from the center of the ellipse , but just five meters from the exact place where they wanted to get off, in a great success, but still with great uncertainty).

For Slim, the goal was to reduce the width of the ellipse to a maximum of 200 meters. The process involves advanced algorithms to process surface images in real time and automatically calculate the exact landing trajectory. Interestingly, engineers adapted techniques from facial recognition systems so that the probe could recognize specific craters on the Moon and locate itself.

POUSO-TOMBO

To deal with the steepness of the region chosen for descent, the Japanese also developed a curious landing method, in which the spacecraft descends vertically and, only when its rear legs touch the ground, it tilts to a horizontal position, as if it were falling over the surface.

Since 2013, when China conducted the first lunar landing mission of the 21st century, there have been a total of nine attempts: three Chinese (all successful), two Indian (one successful), one Russian (failed), and three private (from the Israeli group SpaceIL, the Japanese company ispace and the American Astrobotic, all failed). What will happen to the tenth, Slim? Make your bets.

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