2024-01-19 16:34:10
Japan aspired to become the fifth country to successfully land on the Moon. But after a successful takeoff of its SLIM mission (‘Smart Lander for Investigating Moon’), a journey of several months through space and a complex choreography to approach lunar orbit, everything indicates that the ship has managed to land on the surface of the Moon but, at the moment, its status is not clear. Those responsible for the mission affirm that they continue studying the data collected. For now, it is not clear if the ship has survived the complex moon landing or if, on the contrary, it has ended up in pieces.
This mission took off last September from the Tanegashima space center. For several months, this mission wandered through space. On Christmas Day it finally managed to insert itself correctly into lunar orbit. And after several weeks flying over its surface, in mid-January those responsible for the mission stated that, finally, they were in optimal conditions to attempt a landing on one of the edges of the lunar crater Shiolia depression about 270 meters in diameter located in the southeastern part of the visible side of the Moon.
The entire mission route was successful except for the end. This represents a severe setback for the technology developed by the Japanese agency, which boasted of having achieved a landing system so precise that He had even nicknamed him “the lunar sniper.”. So far, the only ones who have been able to successfully land on the Moon are the United States, the Soviet Union, China and, most recently, India.
Lunar jams
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Japan’s is one of the many lunar missions planned for 2024. So much so that there are even those who joke that in the In the next few months we will have ‘traffic jams’ on the Moon. Just a few days ago, for example, the ‘Peregrino’ project took off, which aspired to become the first private spacecraft to land on the surface of the Moon but finally, after a technical failure, it had to abandon its objective and ended up disintegrating in the Earth’s atmosphere.
In the coming months, the takeoff of various robotic missions led by India, China and the United States. Among the most anticipated is the Chinese Chang’e-6 mission, which will incorporate a small orbiter designed by Pakistan, heading to the hidden side of the Moon. NASA, for its part, has announced that the second flight of its Artemis lunar program, the most ambitious to date, is delayed by at least a year so, at least for now, there will be no manned missions to the Moon on the horizon. next.
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