Japan becomes the fifth country in the world to land a spacecraft on the Moon

Efe

Updated Friday, January 19, 2024-18:01

Japan has just become, after

the United States, Russia, China and India

, the fifth country in the world, and the third in this century, to land a spacecraft on the moon.

The SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) touched down on the lunar surface at 00:20 local Japanese time on Saturday, January 20, still 4:20 p.m. on Friday afternoon. Spain.

"The spacecraft appears to be in stable communication with Earth," a JAXA representative said from the agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences in the city of Sagamihara, south of Tokyo, five minutes after the moon landing.

Although an hour later the checks on his condition continued.

The Japanese space agency's probe "JAXA", nicknamed "Moon sniper", was supposed to launch in 2021, but the launch was postponed to September 6 of that year.

After a journey of several months, SLIM successfully reached lunar orbit on December 25.

Japan not only manages to land on the moon but also does so in the most precise way achieved to date.

The SLIM is capable of targeting a landing site that extends just 100 meters.

The descent operation took place without incident.

Around midnight in Japan and when it was about

15 kilometers from the lunar surface

, the SLIM began to descend and scan the terrain with its autonomous obstacle detectors, more advanced than those of conventional spacecraft, with the aim of trying the so-called "pinpoint" or precision/localized landing.

To accurately identify where it was,

the SLIM had navigation cameras installed that identify the craters of the Moon

through comparisons between the images taken by the device itself and the lunar maps it carries, made from global lunar missions. previous.

After reaching an altitude of about 5 kilometers, the vertical descent phase began, one of the most complex and risky of the mission, given that the gravity on the Moon is higher than that of the asteroids on which the country had managed to land until now. and prevents a slow descent, which complicates its positioning.

The device's telemetry systems confirmed its landing on the lunar surface after twenty minutes, according to mission calculations.

JAXA has indicated that it could take at least two hours to determine the status of the space module in order to declare the success or failure of the mission.