Japan, on Saturday, became the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing but said its “Moon Sniper” spacecraft was running out of power due to a solar battery problem.
After a nail-biting 20-minute descent, space agency JAXA said its Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM) had touched down. And communication was established.
But without the solar cells functioning, JAXA official Hitoshi Kuninaka said the craft would only have power for “several hours”. The spacecraft is dubbed the “Moon Sniper” for its precision technology.
SLIM is one of several new lunar missions launched by governments and private firms, 50 years after the first human moon landing.
Crash landings and communication failures are rife. But only four other countries have made it to the moon: the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and, most recently, India.
As mission control prioritized gathering data while they could, Kuninaka suggested that the batteries might work again once the angle of the sun changed.
“It’s possible that it is not facing in the originally planned direction,” he told an early-hours news conference.
“If the descent was not successful, it would have crashed at a very high speed. If that were the case, all functionality of the probe would be lost,” he said.
“But data is being sent to Earth.”
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called the landing “very welcome news.”. But he said he was aware that more “detailed analysis” of the solar cells was needed.
