Japan went to the moon and launched an X-ray observatory into space

On September 6, the Japan Space Agency successfully launched its lunar station on a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center.

This launch marks the beginning of a mission that, if successful, will make Japan the fifth country to successfully land on the Earth's satellite (after the USSR, the USA, China and India).

Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission is relatively simple by today's standards. It consists of a lander the size of a washing machine and weighing only 120 kg without fuel. Its main goal is to demonstrate the latest robotic technology.

The SLIM spacecraft has been dubbed the "lunar sniper" as it will use engine-driven vision to navigate through previously mapped craters for precise landings within 100 meters of goals. This is a new word in lunar missions.

The SLIM lander also houses two small rovers of a rather unusual design. One of them is the Lunar Excursion Vehicle 1 (LEV-1), which does not roll or walk, but jumps across the lunar surface, collecting data on temperature and radiation.

The second is the Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2 (LEV-2 or Sora-Q), built with support from toy manufacturer Tomy. Weighing only 250 grams, it is designed to explore how mini-rovers like these can help in lunar exploration.

Together with SLIM, the latest X-ray space telescope X-Ray Imaging and Spectrocracy Mission (XRISM) - much more advanced than NASA's Chandra and other X-ray observatories in orbit. Its main task is to fill the gap created by the unexpected destruction of the Hitomi mission in 2016 due to a software bug.

One of the XRISM instruments, called Resolve, is a microcalorimetric spectrometer capable of measuring the slightest increase in temperature. It will measure the energy of each individual X-ray and provide information about the composition, movement and physical state of its source.

Mission team expectsthat Resolve's spectroscopic data will be 30 times more accurate than what Chandra instruments can provide. It can detect X-rays with energies ranging from 400 to 12,000 electron volts, and this will allow it is better to study the hot regions of the largest structures and objects with the strongest gravitational pull in Universe.

XRISM's scientific activity won't start until January, as scientists have yet to turn on its instruments and tune them up in the next few months.

According to the latest information JAXA, XRISM has already separated from its rocket and has been launched into orbit. Meanwhile, SLIM will travel for several months until it reaches the moon.