That’s right, y’all.

Japan has just become the fifth country to successfully soft-land on the Moon (as in, not uncontrolled impact), following the United States, Soviet Union, China, and India.

This comes in the immediate wake of a failure causing the end of the Peregrine Mission One (built by Astrobotic for NASA’s CLPS* service), a mission we here at Max-Q should have an article out about by the end of the weekend in a delicious deep-dive format.

However, the mission’s fate is sadly in doubt. For whatever reason, potentially being anything as minor as the lander tipping over or just not facing the right direction, the solar panels are not charging the battery onboard the spacecraft, meaning that by the time this article comes out, barring a miracle, the spacecraft is likely already dead.

In fact, while writing this post, the JAXA team behind the mission held a press conference confirming the fate of the spacecraft: that it had landed safely, but had experienced some kind of electrical anomaly preventing it from charging its battery. However, SLIM continued to send data back to Earth, completing its secondary objective after successfully landing within its target region.

This is not humanity’s last chance at the Moon this winter, though. Intuitive Machines plan to send their IM-1 lander on a Falcon 9 just next month (Early February) to the Moon, and Firefly Aerospace and China itself also plan to send new landers sometime in the first half of the year.

We wish the JAXA and SLIM teams the best of luck with potential fixes for the solar panel issue.

Acronyms:

CLPS: Commercial Lunar Payload Services. NASA pays a company to get stuff to the Moon for cheap.