Japan sent two ambitious missions soaring into the heavens today (Sept. 6) — a pioneering lunar lander and a strong X-ray space telescope.
A Japanese H-2A rocket carrying the SLIM moon lander and the XRISM space telescope lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center today (Sept. 6) at 7:42 p.m. EDT (2342 GMT; 8:42 a.m. Japan time on Sept. 7). That was about 10 days later than originally planned, due to weather delays.
Each spacecraft were deployed on schedule, sequentially lower than an hour after liftoff. If all goes in accordance with plan, a couple of months from now, SLIM (“Smart Lander for Investigating Moon”) will try to pull off Japan’s first-ever soft lunar landing — a pinpoint touchdown that may pave the way in which for much more ambitious feats down the road.
SLIM “goals to realize a light-weight probe system on a small scale and use the pinpoint landing technology essential for future lunar probes,” officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) wrote in a mission description.
“The project will aim to chop weight for higher-function observational equipment and to land on resource-scarce planets, with a watch towards future solar system research probes,” they added.
Related: Missions to the moon: Past, present and future
Shooting for the moon
SLIM is a small spacecraft, measuring just 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) high, 8.8 feet (2.7 m) long and 5.6 feet (1.7 m) wide. At liftoff, it tipped the scales at about 1,540 kilos (700 kilograms), but roughly 70% of that weight was propellant.
SLIM will take a protracted, looping and fuel-efficient path to the moon, finally reaching lunar orbit three to 4 months from now. It’ll then eye the lunar surface for one more month or so before attempting a touchdown inside Shioli Crater, a 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) impact feature that lies at 13 degrees south latitude, on the moon’s near side.
The probe goals to land inside 330 feet (100 m) of a goal point inside Shioli Crater — a more precise touchdown than previous lunar landers have attempted. The goal is to display pinpoint-landing tech that would open the moon, and other celestial bodies, to more extensive exploration.
“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards with the ability to land where we would like and not only where it is simple to land, as had been the case before,” JAXA officials wrote within the mission description. “By achieving this, it’ll turn into possible to land on planets much more resource-scarce than the moon.”
SLIM also carries two miniprobes, which will probably be ejected onto the lunar surface following touchdown. Those two little craft will help the mission team monitor the status of the larger lander, take photos of the landing site and supply an “Independent communication system for direct communication with Earth,” in accordance with JAXA’s mission press kit.
SLIM is not the primary lunar lander that JAXA has built. The agency’s tiny OMOTENASHI craft was one in all 10 cubesats that launched with NASA’s Artemis 1 moon mission in November 2022. While Artemis 1 succeeded, OMOTENASHI didn’t; its handlers couldn’t establish communications with the little probe in time for its planned touchdown try. (Several of the opposite Artemis 1 cubesats failed of their missions as well.)
And a Japanese lander has tried its hand at a lunar touchdown before. The Tokyo-based company ispace’s Hakuto-R lander reached lunar orbit — an enormous accomplishment for a non-public spacecraft — but crashed during its touchdown attempt this past April.
Success by SLIM would due to this fact be historic. Just 4 nations have soft-landed a probe on the moon to this point — the Soviet Union, the USA, China and India. India put its name on this exclusive list just last month, when its Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down near the lunar south pole.
Related: See 1st photos of the moon’s south pole by India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander
An X-ray space telescope, too
As exciting as SLIM is, it’s merely the secondary payload on Sunday’s launch. The fundamental spacecraft is XRISM, which is headed for a perch in low Earth orbit.
XRISM (short for “X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission”) is a collaboration involving JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). As its full name suggests, the telescope will study the universe in high-energy X-ray light.
“X-ray astronomy enables us to review essentially the most energetic phenomena within the universe,” Matteo Guainazzi, ESA project scientist for XRISM, said in an announcement.
“It holds the important thing to answering essential questions in modern astrophysics: how the most important structures within the universe evolve, how the matter we’re ultimately composed of was distributed through the cosmos, and the way galaxies are shaped by massive black holes at their centers,” he added.
The observatory will focus particularly on the super-hot gas surrounding galaxy clusters.
“JAXA has designed XRISM to detect X-ray light from this gas to assist astronomers measure the overall mass of those systems,” ESA officials wrote in the identical statement. “This can reveal information concerning the formation and evolution of the universe.”
XRISM won’t be the one X-ray telescope studying the heavens from Earth orbit. Also up there right away, for instance, are NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, each of which launched in 1999, in addition to NASA’s NuSTAR, which lifted off in 2012.