Japan is on the verge of making lunar history. A perilous landing on the edge of a crater, two innovative and surprising rovers… Here is everything you need to know about the ambitious SLIM mission.
All lights are green for the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) SLIM mission, launched on September 7, 2023 from the Tanegashima Space Center. The lander is due to begin its descent towards the Moon this Friday, January 19 at 4:20 p.m. (Paris time). Broadcast live on YouTube by the Japanese space agency, the descent should last twenty minutes before the craft lands on the lunar surface near the Shioli crater. For this delicate maneuver, SLIM will be able to count on cutting-edge equipment which offers it unprecedented precision of 100 meters compared to several kilometers for previous lunar probes. Such a feat is possible thanks to an innovative navigation system based on a high-resolution camera allowing the probe to know its position very precisely. Finally, the probe can be landed on steep terrain because the machine lands vertically before tipping onto its side. The Shioli crater was therefore chosen for the difficulty it represents and which allows this new landing system to be tested.
The probe has an instrument called MBC (Multi-Band Camera) which will be used to study the composition of the surrounding rocks. But the mission will also carry two particularly intriguing mini-rovers. The first, equipped with a camera, will be capable of jumping to the lunar surface, while the second resembles a metal sphere capable of opening into two half-spheres serving as wheels for the machine. Resulting from the collaboration between the Sony company and a Japanese toy manufacturer, Takara Tomy, “Sora-Q” is a mini-rover capable of evolving and crossing obstacles on the lunar regolith, this layer of dust which covers the soil of the Moon. Its objective will be to study the composition of the latter and to test this unique mode of travel.
For Japan, the stakes of this space mission are high since it would allow it to join the very restricted club of countries having achieved the feat of landing a machine on the Moon alongside the United States, the former -USSR, China and India. This is therefore a symbolic step for the Japanese space agency which seeks to find a place among the great powers of space exploration. If for the moment everything is going as planned, let us remember that landing a ship on the surface of the Moon remains a very delicate operation and that many missions have seen their objective escape them recently, such as Peregrine, the American lander which suffered a fuel leak in January, or the Russian and Japanese probes, Luna-25 and Hakuto-R which crashed on our natural satellite in 2023…
