Which countries have already landed on the Moon? See full list – 02/22/2024 – Science

In a busy year for the Moon, another mission will seek to touch Earth’s natural satellite. This time, IM-1, the inaugural flight of Intuitive Machines, from Houston (United States), will try at 6:24 pm this Thursday (22) to be the first private company to land — initially, the scheduled time was 7:49 pm.

If everything goes well with the Odysseus module, it will be the 25th lunar landing in history.

At the beginning of this year, another private mission — with the Peregrine module, from the company Astrobotic — still failed on the way to the satellite. A problem in the propulsion system caused a fuel leak.

A little earlier, in 2023, other missions also failed.

This was the case with Japanese ispace, which launched the Hakuto-R Mission 1 (M1) module in April. A calculation error left the probe without fuel.

Months later, in August, Luna-25 lost control and crashed into the lunar soil. It was the first Russian mission in 47 years, and the crash highlighted the decline of the country’s space program, which has accumulated eight landings on the satellite.

In addition to the United States and Russia (in fact, the Soviet Union), only China, India and Japan have completed landings.

However, when thinking about humans actually walking on lunar soil, only the Americans were successful. There were 12 astronauts who set foot on the satellite and 24 who made the journey from Earth to the Moon, all through the Apollo missions.

In 1969, humanity took its first steps on the Moon, with the Apollo 11 mission. On that occasion, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface.

The other countries that graduated did so with robots. The first robotic landings took place in 1966. The Soviet Union, in February of that year, arrived on the lunar soil with Luna 9. In June of the same year it was the USA’s turn, with Surveyor 1.

The last lunar landing of the 20th century by a robot occurred in August 1976, with the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission.

Decades later, in 2013, China landed on the natural satellite, with robotic equipment.

In 2023, India also achieved the feat. The Chandrayaan-3 mission landed on the Moon on August 23. The feat, by the way, was not small: the Indians made the first descent to the lunar south pole, a more challenging region for landing than the equatorial belt.

The landing was broadcast live by ISRO (the Indian space agency). There was also a speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who pointed to success as an achievement for humanity. He also said that everyone can aspire to the Moon, including countries in the so-called Global South.

The Indians had already attempted a landing, with the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2019, but without success — the landing module crashed into the lunar soil, due to a software failure in the operation of the descent engines.

The most recent landing — with some emotion and doubt — was the Japanese.

On January 19 of this year, Japan celebrated its debut landing. The flight was made with the Slim landing module (an acronym that in Portuguese means smart lander for investigating the Moon), in a low-cost mission intended to demonstrate a high-precision robotic landing.

However, in the live broadcast of the landing, it was not immediately clear whether the module had survived the descent. For a long period — to the point where the broadcast was terminated, with a subsequent press conference resuming the topic —, Jaxa (Japanese space agency) did not make the ship’s situation clear.

It was later reported that the probe’s solar panels were not generating electricity, which could shorten the life of the equipment.

After nine days, Jaxa announced that it had resumed the probe’s operations. Shortly afterwards, however, he stated that Slim would go into a dormant state during the two weeks of lunar night.

“Although Slim was not designed for harsh lunar nights, we plan to try operating it again in mid-February when the Sun returns to illuminate its solar cells,” Jaxa said on social media.

There were no further announcements about the probe’s status after that.