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Japan’s First Lunar Surface Mission Makes Flyby October 18, 2023 In the Spotlight Credit: JAXA Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) spacecraft completed its initial lunar flyby a few weeks after launch. The lander is now in a looping orbit, positioning it for a return to ...
"By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the moon." If all goes according to plan, SLIM will also deploy two miniprobes onto the lunar surface after touching down. These daughter craft will snap photos, help mission team members monitor ...
Japan's SLIM moon lander, photographed on the lunar surface in January 2024 by LEV-2, a tiny rover that traveled to the moon with SLIM. (Image credit: JAXA) SLIM had an engine failure during descent that placed it upside down, but otherwise the mission met its goal of getting very clos...
Japan has become the fifth country to land a craft on the moon, but problems with its solar panels mean the mission hangs in the balance. Dubbed the "moon sniper", the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) probe was attempting a risky landing on a slope at the rim of a crater ...
The SLIM project attempted to communicate again with the long-lived Moon lander on August 22nd and 23rd, but received no response from the probe. “As a result, it was determined that there was no prospect of communication being restored in the future, and so at around 10:40 pm on the ...
The president of JAXA, Japan’s space agency, said that the landing of the SLIM craft on the Moon was successful. Scientists said they’ll need time to analyze data to determine if all the goals of the mission were achieved.
Japan has announced that it is getting ready to launch its first unmanned mission to the Moon in 2018, which would make it the fourth nation to land on Earth’s satellite and help pave the way for manned missions in the future.
To cheers and applause at mission control, theSmart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, and the XRISM space research satellite developed with the US and European space agencies both separated soon afterwards. An H2-A rocket carrying a small lunar surface probe and other objects lifts off fr...
The SLIM mission has made "minimum success" by landing on the moon, officials said earlier, so why do they look so miserable? That's the question one reporter has just put to the panel. Hitoshi Kuninaka responds by saying it is "somewhat concerning" that SLIM's solar cells ...