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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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Images Show China Building Huge Fusion Research Facility

A satellite photo shows a new large-scale laser fusion research center in Mianyang, China. Courtesy of Planet Labs
A satellite photo shows a new large-scale laser fusion research center in Mianyang, China. Courtesy of Planet Labs
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Images Show China Building Huge Fusion Research Facility

A satellite photo shows a new large-scale laser fusion research center in Mianyang, China. Courtesy of Planet Labs
A satellite photo shows a new large-scale laser fusion research center in Mianyang, China. Courtesy of Planet Labs

China appears to be building a large laser-ignited fusion research center in the southwestern city of Mianyang, experts at two analytical organisations say, a development that could aid nuclear weapons design and work exploring power generation.

Satellite photos show four outlying "arms" that will house laser bays, and a central experiment bay that will hold a target chamber containing hydrogen isotopes the powerful lasers will fuse together, producing energy, said Decker Eveleth, a researcher at US-based independent research organisation CNA Corp.

It is a similar layout to the $3.5 billion US National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Northern California, which in 2022 generated mceore energy from a fusion reaction than the lasers pumped into the target - "scientific breakeven".

Eveleth, who is working with analysts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), estimates the experiment bay at the Chinese facility is about 50% bigger than the one at NIF, currently the world's largest.

The development has not been previously reported.

"Any country with an NIF-type facility can and probably will be increasing their confidence and improving existing weapons designs, and facilitating the design of future bomb designs without testing" the weapons themselves, said William Alberque, a nuclear policy analyst at the Henry L. Stimson Center.

China's foreign ministry referred Reuters questions to the "competent authority". China's Science and Technology Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

In November 2020, US arms control envoy Marshall Billingslea released satellite images he said showed China's buildup of nuclear weapons support facilities. It included images of Mianyang showing a cleared plot of land labeled "new research or production areas since 2010".

That plot is the site of the fusion research center, called the Laser Fusion Major Device Laboratory, according to construction documents that Eveleth shared with Reuters.

NUCLEAR TESTING

Igniting fusion fuel allows researchers to study how such reactions work and how they might one day create a clean power source using the universe's most plentiful resource, hydrogen. It also enables them to examine nuances of detonation that would otherwise require an explosive test.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, of which both China and the United States are signatories, prohibits nuclear explosions in all environments.

Countries are allowed "subcritical" explosive tests, which do not create nuclear reactions. Laser fusion research, known as inertial confinement fusion, is also allowed.

Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, another key US nuclear weapons research facility, said that with testing banned, subcritical and laser fusion experiments were crucial to maintaining the safety and reliability of the US nuclear arsenal.

But for countries that have not done many test detonations, he said - China has tested 45 nuclear weapons, compared with 1,054 for the United States - such experiments would be less valuable because they do not have a large data set as a base.

"I don't think it would make an enormous difference," Hecker said. "And so ... I'm not concerned about China getting ahead of us in terms of their nuclear facilities."

Other nuclear powers, such as France, the United Kingdom and Russia, also operate inertial confinement fusion facilities.

The size of those facilities reflects the amount of power designers estimate is needed to apply to the target to achieve ignition, said Omar Hurricane, chief scientist for the inertial confinement fusion programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which operates NIF.

"These days, I think you probably can build a facility that's of equal energy or even more energetic (than NIF) and a smaller footprint," Hurricane said. But, he added, at too small a scale, experimental fusion does not appear possible.

That other countries operate laser-driven fusion research centers is not a cause for alarm in itself, Hurricane said.

"It's kind of hard to stop scientific progress and hold information back," he said. "People can use science for different means and different ends, and that's a complicated question."