Japan decided to break the lunar landing accuracy record

The Moon will soon be crowded. No sooner had the Indian mission Chandrayaan-3 landed on the moon on August 23 than the Japanese lunar module SLIM headed there, only not to the South Pole, but closer to the equator.

Against the background of the long-awaited landing of the Russian spacecraft, and then the difficult experience after its fall, the message from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that their lunar is flying only as a payload looks simply surprising. Despite the fact that SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) is supposed to be the first lunar lander on the Moon for the Japanese, they treat it somehow in a simple way, as if they send them every day . To be more precise, two previous missions – the OMOTENASHI satellite and the HAKUTO-R module were sent by Japan to our satellite last year, but both ended their journey unsuccessfully. Now – a new try.

The H-IIA rocket, carrying the X-ray telescope XRISM and the lunar SLIM into space in addition, launched on September 7 at 2.42 Moscow time from the Tanegashima Space Center site. Started with a delay of 10 days due to weather. Both vehicles were successfully launched into their orbits.

First, a few words about the XRISM telescope. Scientists hope that it will unravel many of the mysteries of the Universe through its unique fine X-ray spectroscopy. In particular, he will be able to better “see” the very hot ionized gas in clusters of distant galaxies and understand how they evolve, and there is also hope to study the behavior of matter near the event horizon of black holes.

As for SLIM, it should approach the Moon in 3-4 months, and then after another month it will softly land in Scioli Crater (on the eastern side of the larger Kirill Crater) on the visible side of the Moon. Shioli itself has a diameter of 300 meters, and the landing accuracy, if it is achieved by specialists from the Land of the Rising Sun, will be a record – 100 meters (for example, Luna-25 and the Indians had an error of within 3 km).

So, we will find out whether Japan will become the fifth country (after the USSR, USA, China and India) to softly land its spacecraft on the Moon on New Year’s Eve. In the meantime, let’s figure out what new, besides a soft landing, SLIM can bring to space science.

During the descent, it will be equipped with a terrain recognition system – this will help avoid colliding with a large stone or rolling down a hill. After landing, two “lions” will literally roll out of the station, that is, two tiny lunar rovers “LEV-1” and “LEV-2”. The first will softly spring on the surface, the second will change shape when moving. It is assumed that LEV-1 will be equipped with the ability to send images of the lunar surface directly to Earth, bypassing the base lander.

Let us recall that a few days ago, at the South Pole of the Moon, the Indian apparatus “Pragyan” (Cognition) “fell asleep” for the duration of the two-week lunar night. During two weeks of wakefulness, he transmitted data to Earth about the composition of the soil and measured its temperature, which turned out to be almost three times warmer than scientists had previously thought. Namely, it reached 70 degrees Celsius.

According to Alexander Bazilevsky, chief researcher at the Laboratory of Comparative Planetology of the Geochemical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, this result may well be explained by the fact that the temperature probe of the Indian apparatus measured the temperature in a place that was covered by the landing apparatus itself. It shielded the release of heat, which is why the temperature turned out to be so high. However, according to the scientist, one should not assume that the entire surface of the Moon can heat up to 50-70 degrees.

As for the chemical elements, according to the data that was published in the Indian press (the full scientific report has not yet been published), the Indian apparatus did not discover America. On the Moon, according to available data, signs of sulfur, aluminum, iron were found – everything that was previously discovered by instruments in other countries.

Everyone was waiting for confirmation from the device that landed on the South Pole of the Moon that there was water there. However, the Indians did not find hydrogen, the main characteristic of water. It turns out that this was not intended, because the instruments installed on the Pragyan were not designed to probe below the surface of the soil, where hydrogen can be detected. Our active detector of neutrons and gamma rays ADRON, installed on Luna-25, was “capable” of doing this, but, unfortunately, it was not able to deliver it to its destination.