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Japan Launches Lunar Lander SLIM into Space

A H-IIA rocket carrying a small lunar surface probe and other objects lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima island, Kagoshima prefecture on September 7, 2023. (Photo by JIJI Press / AFP) / Japan OUT
A H-IIA rocket carrying a small lunar surface probe and other objects lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima island, Kagoshima prefecture on September 7, 2023. (Photo by JIJI Press / AFP) / Japan OUT
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Japan Launches Lunar Lander SLIM into Space

A H-IIA rocket carrying a small lunar surface probe and other objects lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima island, Kagoshima prefecture on September 7, 2023. (Photo by JIJI Press / AFP) / Japan OUT
A H-IIA rocket carrying a small lunar surface probe and other objects lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima island, Kagoshima prefecture on September 7, 2023. (Photo by JIJI Press / AFP) / Japan OUT

Japan launched a lunar exploration spacecraft on Thursday aboard a homegrown H-IIA rocket, hoping to become the world's fifth country to land on the moon early next year, Reuters reported.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the rocket took off from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan as planned and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM).

Unfavorable weather led to three postponements in a week last month.

Dubbed the "moon sniper", Japan aims to land SLIM within 100 meters of its target site on the lunar surface. The $100-million mission is expected to start the landing by February after a long, fuel-efficient approach trajectory.

"The big objective of SLIM is to prove the high-accuracy landing ... to achieve 'landing where we want' on the lunar surface, rather than 'landing where we can'," JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa told a news conference.

Hours after launch on Thursday, JAXA said it picked up signals from SLIM showing it was operating normally.

The launch comes two weeks after India became the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the unexplored lunar south pole. Around the same time, Russia's Luna-25 lander crashed while approaching the moon.

Two earlier lunar landing attempts by Japan failed in the last year. JAXA lost contact with the OMOTENASHI lander and scrubbed an attempted landing in November. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, made by Japanese startup ispace, crashed in April as it attempted to descend to the lunar surface.

SLIM is set to touch down on the near side of the moon close to Mare Nectaris, a lunar sea that, viewed from Earth, appears as a dark spot. Its primary goal is to test advanced optical and image processing technology.

After landing, the craft aims to analyze the composition of olivine rocks near the sites in search of clues about the origin of the moon. No lunar rover is loaded on SLIM.

Thursday's H-IIA rocket also carried the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency. The satellite aims to observe plasma winds flowing through the universe that scientists see as key to helping understand the evolution of stars and galaxies.

Ground stations in Hawaii and Japan received signals from XRISM soon after the launch confirming that the satellite's solar panels successfully deployed, Reuters quoted JAXA as saying.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries manufactured the H-IIA rocket and operated the launch, which marked the 47th H-IIA Japan has launched since 2001, bringing the vehicle's success rate close to 98%.

JAXA had suspended the launch of H-IIA carrying SLIM for several months while it investigated the failure of its new medium-lift H3 rocket during its debut in March. Japan plans to retire the H-IIA after its 50th launch in 2024.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in a social media post after the launch on Thursday that developing flagship rockets is essential to Japan's independent space activities.

"We'll build up the momentum toward the successful re-launch of the H3 rocket," Kishida posted on the social media X, previously known as Twitter.

Japan's space missions have faced other recent setbacks, with the launch failure of an Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test in July.

JAXA plans a joint Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) with the Indian Space Research Organization beyond 2025, in which Japan's H3 rocket will carry India's next lunar lander into space.

The country also aims to send an astronaut to the moon's surface in the latter half of the 2020s as part of NASA's Artemis program.

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Varieties

Rubbish Roads: Nepal Explores Paving with Plastic

This photograph taken on December 26, 2024 shows a worker holding shredded recyclable plastic waste at the Green Road Waste Management processing facility in Pokhara. Cars speeding along a smooth, black-colored street in Nepal's Pokhara are also driving over heaps of discarded plastic, transformed into an ingredient in road construction. (AFP)
This photograph taken on December 26, 2024 shows a worker holding shredded recyclable plastic waste at the Green Road Waste Management processing facility in Pokhara. Cars speeding along a smooth, black-colored street in Nepal's Pokhara are also driving over heaps of discarded plastic, transformed into an ingredient in road construction. (AFP)
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Rubbish Roads: Nepal Explores Paving with Plastic

This photograph taken on December 26, 2024 shows a worker holding shredded recyclable plastic waste at the Green Road Waste Management processing facility in Pokhara. Cars speeding along a smooth, black-colored street in Nepal's Pokhara are also driving over heaps of discarded plastic, transformed into an ingredient in road construction. (AFP)
This photograph taken on December 26, 2024 shows a worker holding shredded recyclable plastic waste at the Green Road Waste Management processing facility in Pokhara. Cars speeding along a smooth, black-colored street in Nepal's Pokhara are also driving over heaps of discarded plastic, transformed into an ingredient in road construction. (AFP)

Cars speeding along a smooth, black-colored street in Nepal's Pokhara are also driving over heaps of discarded plastic, transformed into an ingredient in road construction.

Nepal's urban areas generate about 5,000 tons of solid waste per day, according to the World Bank, of which 13 percent is plastic waste dumped in landfills.

While high-value plastics, like bottles, are absorbed by the recycling industry, low-value plastics -- such as multi-layered packaging -- pose a significant challenge because they don't fit into a single recycling category.

For a group of young Nepali entrepreneurs, the vast accumulation of this low-value plastic waste presented an opportunity.

"A plastic road can use even low-value plastics," said Bimal Bastola, founder of Green Road Waste Management, the organization leading the initiative in Nepal.

"We saw scope for such plastics to be utilized as a raw material, partially substituting bitumen in road construction."

Discarded packages of noodles, biscuits and other snacks move along a conveyor belt at their trash-sorting center.

The divided plastic is then put into machines to be shredded into fine pieces.

Since the early 2000s, neighboring India has been leading the world in building a network of plastic roads, even making the usage of plastic waste mandatory in roads near large cities in 2015.

A growing number of countries are experimenting with it, including nearby Bhutan and Bangladesh.

In traditional road construction, bitumen is the binding material, a tarry oil product mixed directly with hot aggregates before paving a road.

The plastic road method, however, first coats the aggregates with shredded plastic before adding bitumen.

"This method reduces the need for fresh raw materials, lowers costs, prevents water infiltration and increases road lifespan," Bastola said.

Studies show that roads paved with plastic waste can be twice as durable as normal roads.

- 'Scale up' -

Globally, only nine percent of plastic waste is recycled, while 19 percent is incinerated, and nearly half ends up in controlled landfills, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Left unchecked, the production of synthetic polymers -- the building blocks of plastics -- is expected to reach about 1.2 billion tons annually by 2060.

The plastic that accumulates in the environment is non-biodegradable, takes hundreds of years to decompose and breaks down into tiny microscopic particles.

And while Nepal banned single-use plastic bags thinner than 40 microns, that ban is not strictly implemented.

For Bastola, increasing plastic road construction is key to making the recycling of low-value plastics economically viable.

His organization says about two tons of shredded plastic is used to build a kilometer of road.

So far, the organization has completed about 10 projects totaling a little over 1.5 kilometers (one mile).

"It is happening at a small scale, we need to scale up," Bastola said. "We have to make government-level projects and we are trying to work closely with the department of roads."

A pilot project is planned this year in the capital Kathmandu at a major intersection.

"Nepal is keen on testing this technology through pilot projects," said Arjun Nepal, an engineer with the Kathmandu road department.

"But to take it forward, we need government-led standards to ensure quality."

The World Bank says life cycle analyses of plastic roads are limited and it is still not clear what environmental impacts -- if any -- recycled plastics may have when used in road construction.

"While initial anecdotes and pilot studies show promise, further research is needed to measure emissions during production, evaluate microplastic release over time and determine how these roads behave once they are decommissioned," said Valerie Hickey, global director of the World Bank's climate change group.

Despite these concerns, environmentalist Bhushan Tuladhar said that plastic roads present an important opportunity for Nepal.

"It is a low-hanging fruit to address two problems simultaneously -- the need for strong roads and the management of plastic waste -- for a developing country like Nepal," he said.