MITHILA RAHMAN TUSI
Japan wants to set a good foundation for itself in the international competition to find water resources and build a sustainable climate on the Moon when its rocket attempts a delicate arrival in the early hours of Saturday.
An effective score would make Japan the fifth country to do so, after India became the fourth last year. Additionally, the Japan Aviation Research Organization (JAXA) is attempting to become the first to complete a "precise" arrival at a divine body, placing its Brilliant Lander lander to investigate the Moon (Thin) within 100 meters of a target site on the sloping edge. from a cavity south of the lunar equator.
The mission comes 58 years after the former Soviet Union's Luna 9 achieved the first surviving satellite upon arrival in 1966, and would place Japan in a select club that also includes the United States and China. SLIM marks Japan's overhaul of lunar research after it became the third country to send a spacecraft to the lunar circle in 1990 and cause it to crash. In 2007, Japan sent a lunar test, Kaguya (Selene), and conducted point-by-point guidance of the north and south poles. However, from that point on, Japan has been relatively absent from the game, while China made a delicate arrival in 2013, reached the other side in 2019, and prevailed in a different mission to recover lunar samples in 2020.
The Japanese art will begin to descend from a height of 15 kilometers at 12:00 Japanese time (15:00 GMT on Friday) and is supposed to hit bottom 20 minutes later.
The 2.4-meter-tall lander will fall on its side once its main arrival gear comes into contact with the 15-degree tilt, to establish its position. SLIM is currently in a 150 x 600 kilometer curved circle around the moon. On Friday, you will reduce the circle to 15 km x 600 km around 13:30 GMT to plan your arrival. At that point, JAXA will decide whether to continue with the plunge.
Photo-Malay Mail
Thin was picked up by Mitsubishi Electric, which also provided the shuttle's PC, arrival radar and transponder, while its engines were handled by IHI and the main engine by Mitsubishi Weighty Enterprises. The lander was launched aboard the Japanese H2A rocket on September 7. It took almost three months to enter the lunar circle, on December 25, as it took a complex ecological direction, using the gravitational power of the Earth and the moon. SLIM will land on the edge of a hole approximately 300 meters wide, called Shioli. JAXA believes the target region is covered in olivine stone, a moderately heavy mineral that existed beneath the moon's surface before being released by a meteorite impact. Researchers hope to examine the chunk of olivine, compare it to that of the planet and track signs of the moon's disposition. According to one proposal, the moon formed from debris from an impact between Earth and another small planet.
To focus on the piece of olivine, Thin will use a multi-band camera, which allows researchers to dissect the spectra of sunlight reflected from the surrounding rocks.
Thin is a minimum-cost lander that weighs only 700 kilograms. This is equivalent to 1,800 kg for India's Chandrayaan-3, which reached the Moon on August 23, and about 1,000 kg for the Japanese spaceflight organization ispace's lander, which collided with the surface on the 26th. of April. The spacecraft will send two small meanders. One maneuvers using a bouncing instrument while the other, shaped like a ball, explores the surface by moving. Both are equipped with cameras and will be entrusted with the task of sending photographs back to Earth.
The race to reach the Moon has advanced rapidly as researchers have become convinced that water ice will likely exist at a surface level. Water could not sustain human settlements, but it also could not be used as fuel for further space travel by breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen.
China is preparing for the world's most memorable return mission to the far side of the Moon this year to show its leadership in lunar research. Beijing also said in May that it intends to land Chinese space explorers on the moon by 2030. India followed up last month with its own statement that it hopes to send the first Indian to the moon by 2040.
The United States intends to send four space explorers to the lunar surface starting in 2026 under the Artemis program, to which Japan is a donor. Japanese space travelers are supposed to join a crewed landing mission sometime this decade. "Japan needs to have the ability to reach the Moon to have an impact on human lunar research," said Junya Terazono, a master in planetary sciences who runs a Japanese Lunar Data Site. He said it could take years, even many years, before dreams of a longer-lasting human presence are realized, but that "to start dealing with it after it becomes a reality would be to be beyond the point of no return."
"You must be in the game right now."
News Source-Nikki Asia
