On January 19, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) spacecraft of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched in September, was expected to soft-land on the moon. Shortly after the stipulated time, reports from JAXA indicated the lander had touched down but its solar panels were not producing power, forcing the craft to bank on its batteries. However, SLIM, it said, appeared to be transmitting data, and checks of its other components did not indicate any damage — meaning Japan had become the fifth country to soft-land a robotic spacecraft on the moon. SLIM, like Chandrayaan-3, was tasked with a lunar soft-landing and deploying a rover mission (with two small rovers) but its primary mission was pioneering. Thus far, interplanetary spacecraft to the moon and Mars have been assigned suitable landing areas several hundred metres wide. SLIM however was designed to land within a 100 sq. m area, and thus its nickname “moon sniper”. In a press conference in which they confirmed the controlled descent, JAXA officials also said it could be a month before they could ascertain if SLIM had successfully executed its pinpoint landing.
SLIM’s partial success (for now) comes a day after a moon-landing mission built by Astrobotic, a private U.S. company, and funded by NASA, reentered the earth’s atmosphere following a propellant leak. SLIM also happened roughly a month ahead of a landing attempt by another American company and four ahead of China’s ambitious sample-return mission from the moon’s far-side. JAXA’s lessons from SLIM are expected to inform the planned Lunar Polar Exploration Mission, an India-Japan collaboration with India expected to provide the lander. Precision landing is valuable because it allows lunar missions to begin closer to a place of interest, where there may be a smaller patch suitable for landing, instead of landing further away and roving to the area. And the moon’s surface around its south pole is mostly rough terrain. There are now five countries with the demonstrated ability to land robotic spacecraft on the moon. These plus the European Space Agency are the world’s major spacefaring entities. No other such entity has a robotic lunar mission planned in the near future. Both the U.S. and Russia also last demonstrated their abilities in a bygone era, although the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services programme will be making frequent attempts, as with the Astrobotic mission. As such, the new Space Race is currently being led by Asian countries.
