JAPAN last week became the third nation to launch a spacecraft to the
Moon when a probe called MUSES-A blasted off on board a solid-fuel M3S-II
rocket. Until now, only the two superpowers have sent missions to the Moon.
The probe took off from the Uchinoura Space Centre in southeast Japan
in a night launch on Wednesday, 23 hours and 58 minutes behind schedule.
Computers had halted the first attempt when a hydraulic system lost pressure.
MUSES-A consists of two spacecraft, a main satellite and a lunar orbiter.
The mother craft was this week heading into its first orbit, an elliptical
trajectory circling the Earth every 15 days at a distance of up to 500,000
kilometres.
After three orbits, on 18 March (19 March, Japan time), it will pass
close to the Moon and deploy a tiny orbiter, a craft around 30 centimetres
in diameter. This will circle the Moon for about a month at a distance of
between 17,000 kilometres and 25,000 kilometres, until its internal batteries
run out.
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Japan sees the mission’s real importance as a test of Japan’s technology
for sending more sophisticated scientific craft to the planets.
