2024-01-19 18:10:26
The Japanese Space Agency announced early Saturday local time that its unmanned spacecraft had landed on the moon, but the agency was still verifying its status. More details will be revealed in a press conference soon.
The intelligent lunar exploration lander landed on the moon’s surface at about 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time (1520 GMT).
The Lunar Exploration Intelligent Lander – a lightweight spacecraft the size of a passenger vehicle – relies on precision landing technology that promises greater control than any previous lunar landing.
Most previous probes used landing areas about ten kilometers wide, but the smart Japanese vehicle aims to land in an area only one hundred meters wide.
The intelligent lunar lander is the result of two decades of work on precise technology by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Organization (JAXA), and if successful, Japan will become the fifth country to land on the moon, after the United States, Russia, China and India.
JAXA said that the main goal of the mission is to test a new landing technology that would allow any mission to the moon to land where we want, and not where it is easy to land.
The mission comes just ten days after the failure of the moon mission launched by a private American company, when a fuel leak occurred in the spacecraft hours after launch.
The vehicle, called Moon Sniper, was launched on a Mitsubishi H2A rocket last September. It initially orbited the Earth before entering the moon’s orbit on Christmas Day.
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