Japan lands on Moon but glitch threatens mission | BBC News
BBC News- 706 views
- 20 Jan 2024
Japan has become the fifth country to soft-land on the moon, but problems with the craft's solar power system mean the mission ...
Next, Japan has become the fifth country to land on the Moon after a craft, dubbed Moon sniper, touched down on the lunar surface. But the uncrued vessel has a technical fault, which means it may soon run out of power. Our science correspondent, Palab Gosh. Has more.
Japan's lunar lander has touched down with a soft landing, but there's been a glitch. Its solar panels aren't working, so unless it's fixed, the spacecraft will run out of power. But experts say that the mission has achieved 99% of its aims.
This was all about precision landing. They haven't confirmed the exact precision of the landing, but they're the fifth nation to land successfully on the Moon, and I think that is a huge success.
Flight engineers are pouring through the spacecraft's data, and we'll report next week on what went wrong. But an awful lot went right. They successfully tested an advanced face recognition system to home in on the landing site. It also deployed one of its mini lunar rovers, able to hop where no rover has hopped before. But not another one, which can literally roll back the frontiers of knowledge.
It's a new way of doing space exploration, and a big part of it is to bring down the costs so that we can de-risk these missions, do more of them as a faster turnaround, and hopefully get both more science and exploration out of each one.
The team at the Open University are building an instrument for a future mission involving both Japan and India. India as well as the UK.
Japan's achievement is the start of a new rush to the moon. India got there last year, and later in 2024, there'll be several US attempts. By the end of the decade, there'll to be Chinese and European missions. So it's all getting very interesting.
In the 1960s and '70s, it was all NASA. But now, it's an international race. A small fleet of spacecraft are on their way to lay the ground for humans to return. They're going because there are minerals and resources on the Moon, which will be used to build launch sites to go to Mars And this time, the plan is to stay for the long term. Palab Gosh, BBC News.