Japan became the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on the moon. However. a problem with the spacecraft’s solar panel could limit the data the country can collect.
Japan’s space agency said that its robotic Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) spacecraft touched down on the lunar surface on January 19 morning at 12:20 a.m. local time, marking a huge success for Japan.
The big news came with a worrying announcement. The spacecraft suffered a power glitch soon after landing, which prevented its solar cells from generating the electricity needed to keep it running in the harsh lunar environment.
“Communication with spacecraft has been established after the landing. However, the solar cells are currently not generating power, and priority is given to data acquisition from the SLIM on the moon,” Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in its statement.
The craft may only have power for a few hours as its solar panel isn’t working. JAXA team is analyzing the data to determine the cause of the solar cell issue and the next steps for the lander.
“SLIM [for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon] has been communicating to the Earth station and it is receiving commands from the Earth accurately and the spacecraft is responding to these in a normal way,” said Hitoshi Kuninaka, director general of Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. “However, it seems that the solar cell is not generating electricity at this point in time,” Kuninaka said.
JAXA officials said that the built-in power generation system was perhaps not facing the sun and hoped that it could begin to function once sunlight conditions change.
Hours earlier, tens of thousands of people watched a live stream video of SLIM’s lunar landing.
SLIM and Japan’s lunar ambitions
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was launched into space from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan in September 2023. It took months to reach the moon. SLIM is also called the “Moon Sniper” because of its precision technology to demonstrate a “pinpoint” landing.
According to JAXA, the SLIM moon lander was built to achieve two key objectives:
- To demonstrate a high-precision landing system capable of guiding the probe to touchdown within 100 meters.
- To test an innovative lightweight design allowing smaller spacecraft to carry more sensors and instruments.
The spacecraft is designed to test technology for conducting pinpoint landings on the surface of gravitational bodies with unparalleled precision of less than 100 meters from intended targets, as opposed to previous Moon landers that have an accuracy of within several to around a dozen kilometers.
“There are no previous instances of pinpoint landing on celestial bodies with significant gravity such as the Moon”, according to JAXA.
Japan’s space agency says the mission is crucial to realize a transition away from an era of “landing where we can” toward one of “landing where we want” for future Moon missions, which could include searching for water, requiring pinpoint landings on uneven surfaces such as slopes or rough terrains.
JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa said that the agency would need a month to analyze the landing and exactly what happened to the spacecraft as it reached the lunar surface.
Mini Moon rover built by the toy company that created Transformers
The SLIM spacecraft was equipped with two small rovers — lunar excursion vehicles LEV-1 and LEV-2. Officials believe these have been released just before landing.
Equipped with an antenna and a camera, LEV-1 is tasked with recording SLIM’s landing.
LEV-2, is a small robot jointly developed by JAXA with Sony, Doshisha University, and Takara Tomy, the toy company behind the original 1984 Transformers.
The transformable lunar surface robot ‘SORA-Q’ looks like a metallic ball, which is slightly bigger than a tennis ball, measuring 8 centimeters in diameter and weighing 250 grams. Sora means “universe” in Japanese, while “Q” is a homonym for the Japanese word meaning “sphere.” This little robot can pop open like a Transformer toy, wiggle across the lunar surface, and send images back to Earth.
Japan is now the fifth country to pull off a soft landing on the moon, joining the U.S., China, the former Soviet Union, and India.
The United States and the Soviet Union made their first trips to the lunar surface during the Cold War space race. Four decades later, China successfully carried out the lunar landing in 2013. India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander and rover touched down in August 2023.
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