Japan launched the mission “Moon Sniper” with the purpose of being the fifth country to place a robot on the Moon and compensate for a series of mishaps in its space program.
Only the United States, Russia, China and recently India have achieved successful moon landings. For its part, Japan accumulates two failed missions, one public and one private.
The H2-A rocket lifted off at 08:42 (23:42 GMT on Wednesday) from Tanegashima (south) with the module “Moon Sniper”, which it should reach the moon in four to six months.
The shuttle, whose take-off had been postponed three times due to bad weather, also carries a Research Satellite developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Both the lunar exploration robot and the satellite successfully separated from the rocket shortly after liftoff, prompting shouts of joy and applause in the mission control room.
The lunar robot, officially called SLIM it is designed to land a hundred meters from the target fixed on the satellite instead of the usual margin of several kilometers, hence its nickname “Moon Sniper” (lunar sniper).
“By creating the SLIM moon lander, humans will make a qualitative shift toward being able to land where we want to land and not simply where it’s easy to do so,” JAXA said before launch.
“This will make it possible to land on planets with resources even scarcer than the Moon.”Added.
“There are no previous cases of precision landings on celestial bodies with significant gravity like the Moon,” he said.
The Moon arouses renewed interest in the space agencies of the main countries of the world. In August, a Russian probe crashed into the surface of the satellite, in what was Moscow’s first lunar mission in nearly 50 years.
Four days later, India It managed to carry an unmanned robot near the little-explored South Pole, a historic success for the world’s most populous country and its low-cost space program.
Japan’s previous attempts have failed, including one last year in which it sent a lunar probe called Omotenashi as part of the U.S. Artemis program.
After the launch of the probe from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, something went wrong with the mission and communications were lost.
The Japanese space agency also had recent problems with its launch rockets, with failures at liftoff for its new-generation H3 model in March and the usually reliable Epsilon in October.
In July, a test of the Epsilon S rocket, an improved version, ended with a explosion 50 seconds after ignition.
And in April, Japanese startup ispace also failed to become the first private firm to conquer the moon after losing communication with its probe in what it called “a hard landing.”
The Japanese rocket that blasted off on Thursday also carries the X-ray Spectroscopy and Imaging Mission (XRISM) developed by JAXA, NASA and ESA.
The high-resolution satellite will observe the plasma wind of hot gas blowing through the Universe, which will help study mass and energy fluxes and the composition and evolution of celestial bodies.
(AFP)
