A Japanese spacecraft made a historic “pinpoint” landing on the surface of the moon over the weekend, the country’s space agency said, but there’s a slight problem: the images sent back suggest the probe is upside down.
Japan became only the fifth country to place a rover on the lunar surface – after the US, the Soviet Union, China and India – when its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) touched in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Problems with the probe’s solar batteries initially made it difficult to determine whether it had landed in the intended area. But data provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) shows it landed 55 meters from the target site, between two craters in a region covered with volcanic rock.
Japanese officials said the landing was made with unprecedented precision. Most previous investigations have targeted much wider landing areas measuring up to 10 kilometers in width – a reflection of the many challenges lunar landings present 54 years after humans first sat on the lunar surface.
Jaxa said the probe would likely have been within three to four meters of its intended landing site had one of its main engines not lost thrust in the final stages of its mission, causing a harder-than-expected landing. It aimed at a 100 meter wide target.
Nevertheless, space officials are describing the mission as a success, despite the fact that the probe, nicknamed the “lunar sniper”, apparently tumbled down a crater slope, leaving its solar batteries misaligned and unable to was to generate electricity.
Jaxa said he prioritized transmitting landing data before Slim’s battery died. The agency said there is a chance the probe will be able to recharge once the west side of the moon begins to receive sunlight in the coming days.
“We proved that you can land where you want, rather than where you can,” Jaxa project manager Shinichiro Sakai told reporters. “We have opened the door to a new era.”
He said the images sent back were just as he had imagined. “Something we designed traveled all the way to the moon and took that snapshot. I almost fell when I saw it,” he said, adding that Slim’s precise landing earned him a “perfect score”.
Images from one of two autonomous probes Slim released before touching down show the box-shaped main vehicle on the surface of the moon.
One of the robots is equipped with an antenna and a camera that recorded the probe’s landing and sent images back to Earth. The second is a baseball-sized rover equipped with two cameras jointly developed by Jaxa, Japanese toymaker Tomy and Doshisha University.
By analyzing the rocks, Jaxa hopes to shed light on the mystery of the moon’s possible water sources – key to building bases there one day as possible stopovers en route to Mars.
Slim was launched in September and initially orbited Earth before entering lunar orbit on Christmas Day.
Japan hopes the mission will give it a boost space program after a series of failures. A spacecraft designed by a Japanese company crashed during a lunar landing attempt in April, and a new flagship rocket failed on its debut launch in March.
