Japan moon lander enters lunar orbit

TOKYO – Japan’s Slim space probe entered the moon’s orbit on Dec 25, in a major step towards the country’s first successful lunar landing, expected in January.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) is nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” because it is designed to land within 100m of a specific target on the lunar surface.

If successful, the touchdown would make Japan only the fifth country to have successfully landed a probe on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India.

On Dec 25, Slim successfully entered the moon’s orbit at 4.51pm Japan time (3.51pm Singapore time), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) said in a statement.

“Its trajectory shift was achieved as originally planned, and there is nothing out of the ordinary about the probe’s conditions,” the agency said.

The lander’s descent towards the moon is expected to start around 12am Japan time on Jan 20, with its landing on the surface scheduled for 20 minutes later, Jaxa said.

The H-IIA rocket

lifted off in September

from the southern island of Tanegashima carrying the lander, after three postponements linked to bad weather.

Jaxa said in December that the mission would be an “unprecedentedly high-precision landing” on the moon.

The lander is equipped with a spherical probe that was developed with a toy company.

Slightly bigger than a tennis ball, it can change its shape to move on the lunar surface.

Compared with previous probes that landed “a few or 10-plus kilometres” away from targets, Slim’s purported margin of error of under 100m suggests a level of accuracy once thought impossible, thanks to the culmination of a 20-year effort by researchers, according to Jaxa.

With the advance of technology, demand is growing to pinpoint targets such as craters and rocks on the lunar surface, Jaxa’s Slim project manager Shinichiro Sakai told reporters in December.

“Gone are the days when merely exploring ‘somewhere on the moon’ was desired,” he said.

Hopes are also high that Slim’s exactitude will make sampling of lunar permafrost easier, bringing scientists a step closer to uncovering the mystery around water resources on the moon, he added.

Japanese missions have failed twice – one public and one private.

In 2022, the country unsuccessfully sent a lunar probe named Omotenashi as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission.

In April 2023, Japanese start-up ispace

tried in vain to become the first private company to land on the moon,

losing communication with its craft after what it described as a “hard landing”. AFP