SEOUL, South Korea — Japan’s lunar module resumed operations on the moon late Sunday, overcoming problems with its solar panels, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, quoted by Japanese media on Monday.
While the reset will enable the module to conduct research on the moon’s origins, its primary mission has already been achieved — a mission with major ramifications for future lunar exploration.
The “Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon,” or SLIM, landed on the moon’s surface on Jan. 19, after having been launched last September. The SLIM, which released two robotic lunar rovers with data links to Earth on the moon’s surface, has been nicknamed the “Lunar Sniper” due to its accurate touchdown capability. SLIM landed just 60 yards from its chosen location in the Shioli Crater in the moon’s Sea of Nectar.
The landing would have been even closer, but SLIM maneuvered to evade ground obstacles during its run-in, JAXA said.
“SLIM’s mission architecture hopes to shift the standards of lunar landing missions, from touching down where it’s easy, to setting down exactly where desired,” the nonprofit Planetary Society wrote after last month’s touchdown. “The main objective of the mission was to demonstrate these landing capabilities.”
On prior landing missions, “areas of probable landing” were “on the order of kilometers in terms of length and breadth,” the society explained.
One ramification of the precision landing is for any future facility on the moon. SLIM’s proof of concept means multiple missions could land near each other, stockpiling materials for any base, manned or robotic. If the facility were manned, it potentially means astronauts could be both inserted into the location and extracted from it.
America’s Apollo, from 1968 to 1972, remains the only program to land men on the moon, but Japan’s feat makes it the fifth country to place a working craft on the lunar surface, along with the Soviet Union in 1959, China in 2013, and India, which joined the field in August 2023.
Russia’s most recent attempt, in 2023, failed when its vehicle crashed on the moon: a “hard landing.”
Japan’s success is also good news for the U.S.-led Artemis program, a multinational moon-landing and space exploration effort, which is looking to build a “base camp” on the lunar surface. Japan is a signatory to the Artemis Accords and thus a partner in the program.
Another useful lesson from the Japanese experience — like India’s lunar landing last year — is economics.
“SLIM also aimed to show that small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft are capable of impressive exploration feats,” according to specialty media Space.com. “Its mission cost about [$120 million] to develop.”
The mission was not a total success: The SLIM landed in working order – but upside down, leaving its energy-supplying solar panels misaligned. There were initial fears that the lander had only a few hours of battery power with which to operate.
But Monday’s development suggests solar power has been restored. JAXA officials had hoped, after its rocky landing, that changes in the sun’s angle on the moon’s surface could reach the misaligned panels.
While a near-pinpoint landing was the primary mission task, the secondary task was to undertake research designed to understand the origin of the moon by analyzing surface minerals.
With power back on, that mission, too, is back on, though once the next freezing lunar night descends on Thursday, it is expected that SLIM will shut down.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.