In an effort to become the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the moon, Japan plans to do so in a region the size of Trafalgar Square.
While not the largest or most ambitious robotic mission to our satellite, its garden shed-sized Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, is vying to be the most accurate when it launches today.
JAXA, Japan’s space agency, is aware that it won’t be simple.
In the past six months, the moon has acquired additional craters as a result of a robotic mission from Japan and Russia that failed to make a successful landing.
An American moon probe that was trying to reach the moon crashed back to Earth just yesterday.
Kushiki Kenji, the SLIM mission’s sub-project manager, predicted that the last part of the landing, when the moon’s gravity pulls SLIM toward the surface, “is expected to be a breathless, numbing 20 minutes of terror”.
SLIM, also known as the “moon sniper” by JAXA, plans to land in an area roughly equivalent in size to Trafalgar Square.
That may not sound very impressive, but even recent robot missions have not been able to precisely choose their landing zone and maneuver to it. NASA’s Apollo landers were able to target areas that were several kilometers across.
SLIM makes use of the technology and expertise from JAXA’s 2018 daredevil mission Hyabusa2, which made a successful landing on the asteroid Ryugu.
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It has a ton of pictures of the moon’s surface from different spacecraft in orbit, providing it with extremely precise data to choose its landing spot and precise radar guidance to assist in finding it.
