Japan becomes fifth country to land on the moon

Asia
By Editor_1
The two small rovers carried by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) lunar lander - JAXA via The New York Times
By Kenneth Chang

TOKYO – A Japanese robotic spacecraft successfully set down on the moon Friday (19)— but its solar arrays were not generating power, which will cut the length of time it will be able to operate to a few hours.

With this achievement, Japan is now the fifth country to send a spacecraft that made a soft landing on the moon.

For JAXA, the Japanese space agency, this was the first time it had tried to set down on a planetary body elsewhere in the solar system. The spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was intended to demonstrate precision landing, within a football field of a targeted destination rather than an uncertainty of miles that most landers are capable of.

At 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time Friday — midnight Saturday (20) in Japan, SLIM fired its engines to begin its descent from lunar orbit. At 10:20 a.m., its main landing gear touched the surface near a small crater named Shioli in the equatorial region of the moon’s near side.

The surface there is angled about 15 degrees, which poses difficulties for landing without tipping over. The designers of SLIM thus decided to tilt the spacecraft to one side just before landing, and then after the initial contact with the ground, SLIM tipped forward onto its front legs.

Immediately after the landing, SLIM was able to send radio signals back to Earth. But the commentator on the webcast at that time said repeatedly, “We are still checking the status.” The webcast ended without disclosing SLIM’s fate.

At a news conference a couple of hours later, JAXA officials said the soft landing succeeded but revealed the solar panel problem. They said it was possible that the panels were just pointing in the wrong direction, and they could generate energy later when the sun isshining at a different angle.

The spacecraft is operating using its battery. To conserve energy, the spacecraft’s heaters have been shut off, JAXA officials said.

During the limited time, mission managers were prioritizing the retrieval of navigation data acquired during the landing.

Two small rovers were successfully deployed from the lander just before landing.

Deploying such pinpoint landing capabilities in the future would allow spacecraft to aim closer to intriguing places like craters, instead of large flat plains.

Because the moon has no global positioning satellites or radio beacons, spacecraft have to figure out by themselves exactly where they are. Radar pings informed SLIM how high it was and how fast it was moving. A camera taking pictures of the landscape below helped the spacecraft determine its location by matching the pattern of craters it saw with maps stored in its memory.

Vision-based systems on spacecraft have been limited because they use special computer chips that are hardened against the strong radiation of deep space. Such chips are generally one or two generations behind top-of-the-line chips, with only about one one-hundredth the processing power, JAXA said in a news kit for the SLIM mission.

JAXA developed image-processing algorithms that can run quickly on the slower space chips.

The images allowed SLIM to avoid hazardous rocks and other obstacles during its final approach.

SLIM deployed two unconventional rovers, called Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1 and Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2. One uses a hopping mechanism and carries a thermometer, a radiation monitor and an instrument for measuring the slope and elevation.

The second rover is spherical, about the size of a baseball and weighing a half-pound. Its two halves will pull apart, allowing the rover to crawl along the surface for a couple of hours until its battery is exhausted. JAXA developed this rover in cooperation with Doshisha University and Tomy, a toy company.

LEV-1 is able to communicate directly with Earth, and LEV-2 communicates via LEV-1. Data from the two rovers are being sent back to Earth, JAXA said.

-New York Time

 

 

 

Editor_1
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