2024-01-25 18:21:29
Par Tristan Vey
Published on 01/25/2024 at 7:21 p.m., Updated on 01/25/2024 at 7:21 p.m.
A photo taken by the Sora-Q micro-rover, released a few minutes before hitting the ground, shows Slim lying upside down on the lunar dust. KIM KYUNG-HOON / REUTERS
The craft lost one of its two main engines at an altitude of 50 m, when its autonomous navigation system was looking for a safe landing site.
It has almost become a Japanese space tradition: improbable success. In the 2000s, the Hayabusa probe, for example, “crashed” on the asteroid Itokawa, but gently enough to manage to leave thirty minutes later despite clearly degraded propulsion. The ship finally returned to Earth three years late, bringing back some asteroid dust, the first in the history of humanity. In 2010, the Akatsuki probe failed to enter orbit around Venus before engineers from Jaxa, the Japanese space agency, managed to develop a convoluted plan B to compensate for faulty propulsion and succeed in put into orbit five years later, thanks to a new passage near the planet.
The scenario of the moon landing of the Slim demonstrator (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon), on January 19, is no less strange. The agency revealed Thursday during a…
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