After arriving in orbit across the moon on Christmas Day, Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) moon lander has beamed back its first images of the lunar surface.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) revealed the monochrome but highly detailed images of the crater-pocketed moon surface on its X feed, formerly Twitter.
The photographs were created after the spacecraft was successfully inserted into lunar orbit at 2:51 a.m. EST (0951 GMT or 4:51 p.m. Japan time) on Monday (Dec. 25).
“SLIM successfully accomplished essential engine injection at 16:51 and successfully entered lunar orbit! Below is a picture sent from SLIM near the moon,” JAXA officials wrote.
SLIMは16時51分にメインエンジン噴射を正常に終了し、月周回軌道投入に成功しました!以下月近傍のSLIMから送られてきた画像です。 #SLIM #JAXA #たのしむーん pic.twitter.com/TeuB8OD3LFDecember 25, 2023
SLIM launched on Sept. 6, together with JAXA’s X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM). While XRISM remained in orbit around Earth, conducting its mission to research cosmic X-ray sources, SLIM left our planet for an elliptical orbit, circling the moon roughly once every 6.4 hours.
This orbit brings the lander as near the lunar surface as around 373 miles (600 kilometers), with the spacecraft swinging out so far as 2,485 miles (4,000 km) from the moon.
The 8.8-foot-long (2.7 meters) spacecraft is ready to the touch down on the moon on Jan. 24. If SLIM’s lunar landing is successful, it would make Japan the fifth country after the Soviet Union, the U.S., China, and India to make a lunar landing successfully.
After successfully setting down on the moon, SLIM will confirm the technology needed for landings on the moon and likewise solar system planets, in addition to conducting up close and private investigations of the lunar surface with a small-scale probe, in response to JAXA.
“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards having the ability to land where we would like and not only where it is simple to land, as had been the case before,” the space agency wrote in a mission description. “By achieving this, it would change into possible to land on planets much more resource-scarce than the moon.”