Japan’s ‘moon sniper’ probe made incredibly accurate landing, but is now upside down
A Japanese spacecraft made a historic “pinpoint” landing on the surface of the moon at the weekend, the country’s space agency has said, but there is a slight snag: the images being sent back suggest the probe is lying upside-down.
Japan became only the fifth country to put a craft on the lunar surface – after the US, the Soviet Union, China and India – when its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) touched down in the early hours of Saturday.
Trouble with the probe’s solar batteries initially made it difficult to determine if it had landed in the intended area. But data retrieved by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) shows it landed 55 metres from the target site, in between two craters in a region covered in volcanic rock.
Japanese officials said the landing had been made with unprecedented precision. Most previous probes have aimed for much wider touchdown zones measuring up to 10 kilometres in width – a reflection of the myriad challenges moon landings present 54 years after humans first set foot on the lunar surface.
Jaxa said the probe would probably have been within three to four metres of its intended landing site had one of its main engines not lost thrust in the final stages of its mission, causing a harder landing than anticipated. It had been aiming at a 100-metre-wide target.
Nevertheless, space officials are describing the mission as a success, despite the fact that the probe, nicknamed the “moon sniper”, appears to have tumbled down a crater slope, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity.
Jaxa said it had prioritised transmitting landing data before Slim’s battery ran out. The agency said there was a chance the probe would be able to recharge once the west side of the moon starts receiving sunlight in the coming days.
“We proved that you can land wherever you want, rather than where you are able to,” Jaxa project manager Shinichiro Sakai told reporters. “We opened the door to a new era.”
He said the images sent back were just as he had imagined. “Something we designed travelled all the way to the moon and took that snapshot. I almost fell down when I saw it,” he said, adding