Night Sky

A Moon Landing

Image Credit & Copyright: JAXA, Takara Tomy, Sony Co., Doshisha U.

Almost two weeks ago, on January 19th at just after 7:20 a.m. PST, to be precise, Japan became the fifth country to successfully land a spacecraft on our moon’s surface. Unfortunately, one of the engines aboard the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) failed just a short distance - roughly 150 feet - above the craft’s destination, a rocky slope between two craters situated roughly 200 miles south of the location where the Apollo 11 astronauts landed in 1969.

As a result of the engine failure, while the lander made a “soft” (3 mph) touch-down, it landed the wrong way up, and its long-term power supply, solar cells, were not pointing at the sun. Did this mean the mission was deemed unsuccessful?

No, while landing upside down wasn’t part of the plan since JAXA’s main goal for SLIM was to use optical imaging for making a “pinpoint landing,” that is, to touch the moon’s surface within 100 meters of the lander’s target and SLIM was, at most, only 10 meters off its mark, JAXA claimed to be very pleased with the mission’s outcome.

They have good reason to be pleased. Over the past 11 years of attempts by China, India, Russia, a private Japanese company, and an Israeli non-profit to put a spacecraft on the moon’s surface, only 40 percent have been successful.