Japan’s Slim lander successfully entered lunar orbit, the maneuver took place on Christmas Day. It is a major step for the Japanese space agency’s Jaxa mission, launched on the night of September 6-7. The moon landing is scheduled for January 19, 2024, and if successful, Japan would become the fifth country to land on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India.
Announcing the success of the orbital insertion maneuver, Jaxa said it was in an elliptical orbit around the moon with a minimum distance from the surface of about 600 kilometers.
Slim is the last of three missions launched towards the Moon between July and September 2023, following Russia’s Luna-25, which failed in the descent stage, and India’s Chandrayaan-3, which ended successfully.
Over the next few days, Japanese engineers will gradually lower Slim’s trajectory until it reaches an altitude of just 15 kilometers. At that point, we will proceed to the descent maneuver, which should take about twenty minutes, the goal of which is to get the lander to land on the moon with an accuracy of one hundred meters. Once on the surface, Slim will have to launch two experimental rovers called Lev 1 and Lev 2, the first of which is equipped with some scientific instruments such as a thermometer and a radiation meter that will move by bouncing, the second instead is a sphere developed together with a toy company that will have to move by just rolling.
Slim aims not only to succeed in landing a lander on the moon – an achievement that would make Japan the fifth country to do so – but also to be extremely precise, with an error of less than 100 meters. Lunar descent is still an extremely difficult operation. The new Japanese lander will also test new AI-powered software that can analyze lunar craters and determine the best spot for an automated descent in real-time.
