Moon Missions

       Japan’s Upside-Down Landing U.S. Lander’s Failure Artemis II Delay Moon Race Timeline

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       Japan Explains How It Made an Upside-Down Moon Landing

       The SLIM spacecraft survived its trip to the surface, but ended up pointing in a direction that now limits the duration of its mission.

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       An image captured by one of the SLIM mission’s Lunar Excursion Vehicles showed the lander on the moon’s surface. Credit...JAXA

       By Kenneth Chang and Hisako Ueno

       Jan. 25, 2024Updated 1:37 p.m. ET

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       Japan became the fifth nation to land on the moon on Saturday, but its spacecraft ended up in an awkward position, with its engine nozzle pointed up toward space.

       By design, the Japanese spacecraft, known as Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, was supposed to land on its side, a strategy to avoid tipping over on the sloped terrain of the landing site.

       But about 150 feet above the ground, one of SLIM’s two main engines appears to have failed, officials at JAXA, the Japanese space agency, said on Thursday.

       With the onboard computer trying to compensate for the sudden loss of half of the thrust, the spacecraft was still able to hit the ground at a modest vertical velocity of about 3 miles per hour. But SLIM’s horizontal speed and orientation at landing were outside what it was designed to handle.

       As a result, the spacecraft rolled onto its head. It escaped the fate of some other recent robotic missions, which smashed into pieces on the moon, and its systems worked, communicating with Earth. But the solar panels ended up facing west, away from the lunar morning sun, and were unable to generate electricity. With the battery mostly drained, mission controllers on Earth sent a command to shut down the spacecraft less than three hours after landing.

       Despite the stumble, the mission accomplished its primary goal: a soft landing in rugged terrain on the moon, within 100 meters of a target landing site, much more precise than the uncertainty of miles that most landers aim for.

       Racing to Land, or Crash, on the Moon Six decades of crashes, belly flops and hard landings on the lunar surface.

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       Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. More about Kenneth Chang

       Hisako Ueno has been reporting on Japanese politics, business, gender, labor and culture for The Times since 2012. She previously worked for the Tokyo bureau of The Los Angeles Times from 1999 to 2009. More about Hisako Ueno

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