TOKYO, Japan: Japan’s hopes to become the fifth country in the world to land a working spacecraft softly on the Moon ran into difficulties on Friday after mission controllers said the probe was unable to generate electricity after touchdown.
The mission hit a glitch when the probe landed soon after 3pm UK time. The Japanese robot successfully touched down on the Moon but problems with its solar power system mean the mission may live for just a few hours.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) put itself gently on the Moon surface near an equatorial crater.
The feat made the developed Asian nation only the fifth country to soft-land on Earth’s natural satellite, after the US, the Soviet Union, China and India. The engineers are now battling to save the mission, however.
For reasons not yet fully understood, the craft’s solar cells will not generate power. The glitch has left Slim totally reliant on its batteries and these will eventually discharge. In that case, the craft will go silent. It won’t receive commands and it won’t be able to talk to Earth..
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Engineers are currently prioritising activities as they’ve turned off heaters and are pulling down pictures from the craft. They’re also retrieving data that will tell them how well the landing software worked.
Japanese space agency (Jaxa) scientists will not immediately give up on Slim if it does fall silent. As light angles change on the Moon, it was possible Slim could come back to life, the officials hoped.
Asked at a news conference whether Japan could justifiably claim a soft landing, Jaxa vice president, Hitoshi Kuninaka, said it could.
“If powered descent wasn’t successful, then there would have been a collision with the surface at a very high speed and spacecraft function would have been completely lost,” he told media.
“But it is still sending data properly to us, which means our original objective of a soft landing was successful.”
Slim was carrying two small rovers and telemetry indicates it managed to eject these as planned just before touch-down.
