Will the fourth attempt be the one for Japan? After three postponements since the end of August due to unfavorable weather, the Japanese space agency Jaxa launched its H-IIA rocket this Thursday, September 7, at 8:42 a.m. local time (1:42 a.m. French time), from Tanegashima ( southwest of Japan), on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. This lunar mission aims to bring Japan into the very select club of states that have succeeded in placing devices on the Moon.
On board this rocket is a small lunar module called SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) and nicknamed “Moon Sniper”, supposed to land in four to six months on the Moon with high precision, at a maximum of 100 meters from its target against several kilometers usually. Approximately 47 minutes after liftoff, the separation of SLIM from the rest of the rocket was successful, sparking an explosion of joy and applause in the Jaxa control center, according to live footage broadcast on Youtube.
The launch of this double lunar mission aroused excitement in the country. More than 35,000 people followed the rocket’s takeoff live on YouTube.
The global race to explore the Moon is intensifying. With this mission, Japan hopes to follow in the footsteps of India, which succeeded, in August, in landing a machine for the first time on the Moon, with a mobile robot delivering images and scientific data from the surface of the Moon. lunar south pole.
Before India, only the United States, the Soviet Union and China had ever achieved controlled moon landings. Russia has just failed in a new attempt, its Luna-25 probe having crashed on the lunar soil last month.
La Jaxa has experienced several setbacks with other of its pitchers since last year. In October, its small Epsilon-6 rocket failed its mission shortly after takeoff, and Jaxa’s large new generation H3 rocket then experienced two successive failures in early 2023. This ambitious model, intended to become the successor to the model H-IIA, has still not succeeded in a first mission and the date of a new attempt is not yet known.
Thus, in view of all these recent disappointments, Jaxa President Hiroshi Yamakawa declared himself “extremely happy” on Thursday with the successful launch of the SLIM/XRISM mission. Jaxa “will continue to take steps” to ensure the reliability of its H3 and Epsilon models, he added. “We will pull together to restore confidence in Japanese rocket technology. »