Tokyo: Japan launched its lunar exploration spacecraft Thursday aboard a homegrown H-IIA rocket with many firsts that includes precise landing on the trickier lunar terrain, and XRISM that the NASA astrophysicists believe is future of X-ray astronomy.
If successful Japan will become the world's 5th country to land on the Moon early next year.
According to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), H-IIA rocket took off from Tanegashima Space Center in Southern Japan at 08:42 JST / 00:42 BST / 01:42 CEST Thursday September 07, 2023 as planned and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM).
Along with SLIM Moon lander, a bus-size telescope with X-Ray vision also soared into space Thursday.
The two missions — XRISM and SLIM — would soon part ways, one headed off to spy on some of the hottest spots in our universe, the other to help Japan’s space agency, JAXA, test technologies that are to be used in larger-scale lunar landings in the future, according to The New York Times.
About 47 minutes after the flight began, launch officials were shown in a live video stream to be celebrating in the mission control room as the XRISM and SLIM spacecrafts headed toward their diverging cosmic destinations.
The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission — XRISM for short (and pronounced like “chrism”) — is the launch’s primary passenger. From an orbit 350 miles above Earth, XRISM will study exotic environments that emit X-Ray radiation, including the accretion of material swirling around black holes, the blistering plasma permeating galaxy clusters, and the remnants of exploding massive stars.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, is the next robotic spacecraft headed for the moon but may not be the next one to land.
The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) missions are set to launch on 7th Sep 2023. The SLIM mission will attempt a lunar landing pic.twitter.com/3kkzlZn97T— BuboScience (@BuboScience_) September 5, 2023
The X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) missions are set to launch on 7th Sep 2023. The SLIM mission will attempt a lunar landing pic.twitter.com/3kkzlZn97T
SLIM will be taking a long, roundabout journey of at least four months that requires less propellant. The lander will take several months to reach lunar orbit, then spend a month circling the moon before attempting to set down on the surface near Shioli crater on the lunar near side most probably by February 2024.
This is the Japan's third attempt to Moon its two earlier lunar landing attempts failed in the last year. JAXA lost contact with the OMOTENASHI lander and scrubbed an attempted landing in November. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, made by Japanese startup ispace, crashed in April as it attempted to descend to the lunar surface, according to Reuters.
JAXA had suspended the launch of H-IIA carrying SLIM for several months while it investigated the failure of its new medium-lift H3 rocket during its debut in March.
Japanese Moon mission's primary aim is to test SLIM - the technology for precise landings — within 100 meters of the chosen site — on the trickier lunar terrain.
The SLIM lander aims to touch down in the Shioli Crater, a 984-foot-wide (300-meter) impact basin in Mare Nectaris on the Moon's near side.
“The mission designed to demonstrate accurate lunar landing techniques by a small explorer, with the objective of acceleration of the study of the Moon and planets using lighter exploration systems,” NASA said.
Furthermore, the mission is being presented as an opportunity to prove the capability of landing on the Moon at specific and desired locations rather than merely landing on accessible sites. This precise landing method would allow a robotic probe to land near scientifically relevant locations on the Moon.
Japan joins Moon race about two weeks after India’s ISRO created history through its Chandrayaan-3 Mission which in a first successfully landed on Moon’s little explored South Pole on August 23, 2023.
Interestingly, Russia was in race with India to become the first country to land on Moon’s South Pole. However Russian Moon-cart Luna-25 crashed into Moon just two days before its scheduled landing on August 21, 2023.
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