Japan praises ‘pinpoint’ moon landing of SLIM probe

Japan’s moon lander achieved an unusually precise touchdown within 100 metres of its target, the space agency said yesterday, after the nation became the fifth to put a spacecraft on the moon with the weekend touchdown of its SLIM probe.

Japan hopes the demonstration of what it called a “pinpoint” moon landing will revitalise a space programme seeking to overcome setbacks as it moves to capture a bigger role in space by partnering with ally the US to counter China.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said it received all data about the touchdown of its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) within the 2 hours and 37 minutes before it lost power.

“We proved that you can land wherever you want, rather than where you are able to,” its project manager for the lander, Shinichiro Sakai, told a press conference.

“This will inspire more people, desirably Japanese missions, to try to land on unexplored places on the moon.”

One of the lander’s two main engines probably stopped in the final phase of touchdown, so that it drifted 55m away from the target site, Sakai said. In the absence of engine trouble, it could have landed as close as 3m to 4m from the target, he said.

The lander was toppled on the gentle slope of a crater on the moon’s surface, in a picture published by JAXA and taken by a wheeled rover SLIM deployed during touchdown.

Angled westward because of the tumble, SLIM’s solar panels have been unable to generate electricity, but a change in the direction of sunlight could power it up before the next lunar sunset on February 1 brings freezing cold.

The power outage meant the lander’s multi-band spectral camera, tasked to study the composition of moon rocks, could only generate low-resolution images, JAXA said.

The landing with an error of less than 100m by SLIM, dubbed the “moon sniper”, outstrips the conventional accuracy figure of several kilometres for lunar landers.

Home to several private space start-ups, Japan aims to send an astronaut to the moon in Nasa’s Artemis programme in the next few years.

But JAXA’s recent setbacks in rocket development included the launch failure in March of its new H3 rocket.

That delayed many of Japan’s space missions, including SLIM and LUPEX, a joint lunar exploration project with India, which made a historic touchdown on the moon’s south pole in August.