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Chapter 1: What historical significance does JAXA's moon landing hold?
Earlier this year, Japan made history, but not for the reason you may think. Yes, it landed a spacecraft on the moon for the first time, joining the ranks of the USA, Russia, India and China, who came before them. But JAXA's mission was much more than that. They achieved such a precise landing on the moon, it would be the equivalent of successfully shooting a skin cell from London to Cairo,
and having it land on a specific grain of rice. In the run up to the launch, it was this insane ambition of precision engineering that had everybody talking. Once JAXA touched down, the headlines back on Earth shifted. Nicknamed Moonsniper for its stealthy precision, its whole mission was mainly to demonstrate how precise of a landing we can now pull off.
As such, the tiny spacecraft was not meant to survive the extreme conditions of a lunar night, and yet, somehow it has survived three. Baffling scientists, this resilient craft kept waking up and sending back data and images from the lunar surface. Oh, and it's also upside down. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum.
Join me today on this topsy-turvy ride as we dive into the details of JAXA's first moon landing, what has kept the MoonSniper functional through three lunar nights, and how much pinpoint landings will change the future of lunar exploration. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, also known as SLIM or Moonsniper, is a small, lightweight spacecraft about the size of a passenger vehicle.
Its mission is to analyze the composition of olivine rocks near the Scioli crater, some 200 miles south of the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong took his famous small step. This landing zone stands on ground ejected by the nearby crater, giving researchers a chance to study lunar rock without having to drill.
By analyzing the rocks there, JAXA hopes to learn more about the moon's origins, interior, and formation. SLIM also carried two tiny lunar excursion vehicles, LEV-1 and LEV-2. They were designed to deploy from SLIM and gather some of their own data and photos. Beyond its scientific aims, SLIM is also a showcase of the latest in engineering and mission operations.
It aimed to demonstrate how a small explorer could execute accurate lunar landing techniques. This would accelerate the study of the Moon and other planets by using a lighter, more precise exploration system, able to land in treacherous, rocky terrain too difficult for larger crafts. To understand why this is a big deal, it helps to have some historical context.
The first thing you have to know is that only about 43% of lunar landings are successful. Past lunar missions faced huge limitations in landing accuracy, mainly constrained by technology and the lunar environment. For example, it took the Soviet Union a dozen attempts before they finally landed Luna 9 on the moon. Similarly, NASA's Ranger series took six tries before achieving success.
The absence of an atmosphere on the moon means that landers rely solely on engine thrust for descent, complicating the ability to adjust trajectories accurately during landing. The craft must touch down at near zero speed to ensure no instruments on board get damaged from the impact,
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Chapter 2: How does the Moonsniper achieve precise landings?
For example, the first US craft to make it to the moon in 50 years, the US lander Odysseus, failed to awaken following a lunar night. Much like Slim, it malfunctioned on approach and landed on its nose in early 2024. Despite going into hibernation mode for three weeks, it did not wake up again. Since the moon doesn't really have an atmosphere, there's nothing to stabilise its surface temperature.
During a lunar day, when the moon is facing the sun, temperatures can reach 121 degrees Celsius. During a lunar night, the moon is plunged into total darkness, and temperatures drop to an average of minus 180 degrees Celsius. That's quite the whiplash for our little lander. What's more, days and nights on the moon aren't like the 12 hour days and nights on Earth. They last 14 days each.
That's a fortnight of searing heat followed by a fortnight of total freezing darkness. Slim wasn't designed to withstand a lunar night, so on the 31st of January, the mission team put it into a hibernation state for the next 14 days. It was not expected to survive. But the hopeful crew decided they'd try to establish contact after the sun rose again, just in case.
On the 26th of February, JAXA attempted to re-establish contact with Slim, with few expectations. Imagine their total shock and elation when Slim responded. Their miracle moonsniper survived its first lunar night and started sending pictures back to Earth. It gets even better. After two weeks of data and image collection during its second lunar day, JAXA set Slim into hibernation once again.
Surviving one lunar night is no small feat. No one expected Slim to survive a second one, but somehow it did. On the 21st of March, JAXA confirmed they'd received more communication from Slim following its second lunar night. The pattern continued in late April, when even more pictures were sent back from the lunar surface following its third lunar night.
Slim had totally defied the odds, maintaining its functionality through intense levels of heat and cold which could destroy most electronics not specifically designed for these conditions. Somehow Slim still managed to send back data and images following three lunar nights. These images of the surrounding moon rocks will help researchers better understand lunar geology.
In one image, Slim took a close-up photo of a moon rock called Toy Poodle using a special multiband camera. Despite the blur, geologists can use this to distinguish between the different materials that make up the rock, giving clues as to how the moon formed. Following the fourth lunar night, JAXA attempted once again to re-establish communication with SLIM.
However, as of the 27th of May, they've been unable to confirm successful communication with the moon sniper. Despite all its heroic efforts, it's likely it has fallen silent once and for all. Still, JAXA's first lunar touchdown is a breakthrough in interplanetary travel. Demonstrating the feasibility of such pinpoint landings opens the door to many other possibilities.
One key area of interest to scientists is the South Pole Aitken Basin, where the moon's mantle is suspected to have once been exposed on the surface. NASA is also planning a return to the moon in 2026 with the launch of their Artemis missions.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do lunar missions face during the night?
Pinpoint touchdowns like the one executed by Moon Sniper may be vital in helping us get to water ice lying in permanently shadowed regions, which until now have been inaccessible. Moonsniper stands as a testament to all the progress and innovation we've achieved since the last lunar era of the late 60s and early 70s.
As both public and private interest in revisiting the moon continues to grow, missions like Moonsniper give us a glimpse into what the second lunar era might have in store for us. If I were a superstitious man, I would advise you to be careful what you call your space missions.
When Russia named its first mission to the moon in 47 years, it was originally given the designation Lunar Glob, translating in English to Lunar Sphere. However, this name troubled scientific director of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lev Zeleny. Glob was too similar to a different Russian word, grob, meaning coffin.
Zeleny changed the name of the mission to Luna 25, intending to call back to the earlier Soviet lunar missions, which were the last time Russian spacecraft successfully landed on the moon. But perhaps it was too late, and something of that original name lingered. Because we now know that Lunar Coffin was a much more apt name for the ill-omened Lunar 25.
I'm Alex McColgan, and you're watching Astrum. Join us today as we explore the fate of Russia's first moon mission since 1976. For the country that once led the world in the space race, what exactly went wrong? Although we often look at NASA or ESA missions here at Astrum, Russia's space program has historically been quite the powerhouse.
Back when Russia was part of the USSR, it was the Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite that triggered the space race in 1957, and for a time the Soviet space program went from strength to strength. It was the Soviet Union that put the first man into space, and the first woman, the first multi-person crew, the first dog.
Their rockets escaped the Earth-Moon system first, impacted the Moon first, orbited the Moon first, took photos of the far side of the Moon first, Soviet cosmonauts did the first spacewalk. The USSR launched the first space station. To the eyes of many, and to the pleasure of Soviet leadership, the USSR was winning the space race.
But beneath the surface, not everything was going as smoothly as it appeared. The Soviet Union also saw the first death during a space mission, when the re-entry capsule's parachutes of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov failed to open on his re-entry to Earth. The only three men to have died in space were a crew of Soviet cosmonauts visiting that first ever space station.
Soviet launches were plagued with failures, but eager to look good in the eyes of the world, particularly compared to its rival, the US, the USSR simply didn't report any of its failed lunar missions. It pretended any rocket that didn't make it out of the atmosphere was never intended to be a moon mission at all.
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Chapter 4: How did SLIM survive multiple lunar nights?
It faced budget cuts after the Russian financial crisis of 1998, when the ruble lost over two thirds of its value in three weeks, and was marred in delays that repeatedly knocked it back and put it on hold. The penetrator and orbiter were scrapped, leaving just the lander, as the plan for the mission was reimagined to make it more economical.
Russia wanted to be a nationally recognised player in the space game, but didn't want to spend massive amounts of its budget on the plan. In 2005, Russia only invested 20 billion rubles, or about 700 million US dollars, in its space industry, compared to the USA's 15.6 billion dollars. One way to work around this was to collaborate with other nations.
Russia initially tried to work with India on the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2007. Luna 25 would fly with India's orbiter and be the mission's lander. However, this low spending ultimately punished them, and Russian scientists were unable to get the lander's technology working in time for the initial 2013 launch date.
India eventually abandoned the collaboration and completed Chandrayaan-2 on their own. Russia was left trying to get Luna 25 to the moon's surface solo. India's Chandrayaan-2 lander crashed into the moon. But India was eager to try again with Chandrayaan-3. This set Russia and India on a course from collaborators to competitors.
Both Russia and India were interested in the moon's south pole, where Chandrayaan-2 and others had confirmed through spectrometry the presence of water ice. Luna 25 and Chandrayaan-3 were now racing to be the first lander to successfully touch down on the Moon's south pole, and potentially discover that water ice. However, Russia faced a new problem – the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Western countries were outraged at Russia's decision to attack its neighbour and came together to impose massive sanctions. Not only was this painful economically, but one vital element of these sanctions was a ban on the trade of high-end computer chips and components.
These would prevent Russia from developing high-precision ballistic rockets for use in its military, but hit Russia's lunar goals too. European scientists began ending their collaborations with Roscosmos. In an interconnected world where Russia traded for much of its high-end components, Russia would now have to go it alone.
India completed Chandrayaan-3 and launched it on the 14th of July 2023, a mission we covered in greater detail in a previous video. However, the route that they took to the moon was a fuel-efficient, but time-inefficient one. It would take over a month to actually arrive on the moon's surface. India estimated a touchdown date on the 23rd of August.
If Russia really hurried, it could complete its lander and arrive before India by taking a shorter, more fuel-intensive route using Russia's powerful Soyuz 2.1b rocket. The Lunar 25 mission had, by this time, been delayed from 2021 to 2022, and then to 2023. In a bad stroke of luck for Russia, its BIB navigation sensor didn't pass quality tests.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can be learned from Russia's Luna 25 mission?
Instead, every 18.6 years, the Moon's orbit undergoes a subtle revolution. A shift in its alignment between us and our Sun that causes high tides to grow even higher, tipping us over the edge into dangerous flood territory. But let's delve into what this subtle revolution is. Its name is the Lunar Nodal Cycle, or the precession of lunar nodes.
This complex name refers to a specific feature of the moon's orbit of the Earth. You likely know that every 29.5 days, the moon orbits the Earth. However, this orbit is not flat, or to be more specific, there is a 5 degree difference between the angle of the moon's orbit and the ecliptic plane, the 2D plane on which the Earth orbits around the Sun.
For half of the month, the moon is slightly higher than the plane of the ecliptic. For the other half, it drops below it. Naturally, this means that there are two crossover points, or two nodes – an ascending node and a descending node – that mark the point where the moon goes from one side over to the other.
And it is these nodes that move over the course of the 18.6 year cycle, slowly rotating around the planet in one complete revolution. The nodes themselves are what causes the problem. To understand why, let's recap what we know about tides.
You may already be familiar with how the moon's gravity pulls the Earth's water towards it, causing a bulge in sea levels on the side closest to it that we call high tide. You likely also know that this happens on the side of the planet furthest away from the moon.
Rather than being caused by gravity, this second bulge is caused by centrifugal forces, as the Earth and the Moon's gravitational pull on each other causes them to behave like two dancers holding each other by the arms and spinning across the dance floor. While it's mostly the moon moving, due to the Earth being much more massive, the Earth is also swung around a little.
The water behind it is thus trying to fling off into space through its raucous spinning, causing the second high tide. The Sun also has a role to play in tide formation, albeit to a lesser degree. It's a bigger mass, which would cause a greater pull if it were closer, but its further distance means that the Sun's effect is only one third as big as the Moon.
When the Moon and the Sun are aligned, we get extra large tides, called spring tides. This happens six to eight times a year. When not aligned, they partially cancel each other out, causing smaller tidal extremes known as neap tides. So, now consider the influence of lunar nodes on this tidal tug of war.
During spring tides, the pull of the Sun and the Moon working in unison causes the highest tides and the largest risk of floods. However, the Sun and the Moon are never more aligned than they are at a node. During the rest of each 9.3 year phase, they are not quite tugging in the same direction, so tides are more temperate
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Chapter 6: What is the Lunar Nodal Cycle and its impact on Earth?
NASA had expected this, but they still had to wait with bated breath as Orion's autonomous systems worked to stabilise its entry and as its new heat-resistant exterior plating tried to protect its residents within. At 2,900 metres above sea level, travelling at over 200 kilometres per hour, Orion's parachutes began to deploy. First, three smaller ones, to remove the bay doors.
Next, two drogue parachutes, intended to begin slowing Orion's arrival. And a minute later, the main parachute. Together, these parachutes slowed Orion 1's entry to the point where a human on board could survive it. On the 11th of December, Orion 1 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Activating a wide array of signal beacons, it called for someone to pick it up.
It was the USS Portland that came to collect it. Scientists waited for a couple of hours while the outer casing cooled. This also allowed them to perform even more tests. This time, the tests were on how the salt water of the sea affected various Orion 1 systems, and evaluation on how it had done at resisting the heat of re-entry.
Analysis of that is still underway, but the initial results look positive. The passengers within were not cooked by the 2800°C re-entry temperatures. We are also waiting on NASA for data from the radiation sensors on the mannequins themselves. But they had done it. They had run their race.
The data the Artemis 1 mission had generated would be instrumental in allowing NASA astronauts to stand on the surfaces of worlds other than our own again. humanity's quest to reach ever further frontiers continues. For Orion 1, its part in this ever-developing journey was complete. The Apollo Program. An iconic part of human scientific history.
To this day, we have never beaten some of the landmarks set by the Apollo missions. It is still the only program to get a human beyond a low Earth orbit. And with recent efforts being made by some nations to return people to the moon by as soon as 2024, it seemed like a good idea to look back at mankind's first giant leap to visit our closest neighbour.
But what drove humanity to visit the moon in the first place? And what did we learn once we were there? There's a lot to discuss. The program consisted of 12 crewed flights and over a dozen unmanned ones. There were challenges, breakthroughs in technology, triumphs, and tragedies. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum.
Join with me as today we explore the first steps in getting a man on the moon with the Apollo program. The intro to this new series I'm planning on this incredible group of missions.
All this on a single platform. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. More at servicenow.de slash AI for people.
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Chapter 7: What solutions can help mitigate flooding caused by lunar cycles?
Both astronauts were close to passing out, however they managed to fix the fault, and using the re-entry thrusters, Armstrong calmly got the craft back under control, stopping his tumble. He managed it, with only 30% fuel remaining. Moments like this reinforced the importance of being able to perform EVAs, or extravehicular activities.
And so, Gemini also saw missions where astronauts practiced going outside of their spacecraft to perform checks. Buzz Aldrin set the record for this, performing a 5 hour 30 minute spacewalk, proving that, with proper rests, work outside of a spacecraft was indeed possible. This also gave engineers ideas on ways they could make it easier, such as installing handholds at certain places on the craft.
All in all, it was through the work of Gemini and Mercury that the foundation was laid. Thanks to the discoveries made on both of these programs, NASA was making strides in its objectives to reach the moon. It also started to close the gap between it and Russia. It would now be up to Apollo to take the last steps. Thanks for watching!
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Once again, a huge thank you from myself and the whole Astrum team. Meanwhile, click the link to this playlist for more Astrum content. I'll see you next time.
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