TOKYO, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Japan’s space agency on Monday canceled plans to launch a rocket carrying a spacecraft that would become the country’s first moon landing. The operator, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) (7011.T), citing strong winds as the reason for the
Japan’s main rocket, the H-IIA rocket, boasts a 98% launch success rate, but due to unfavorable wind conditions in the sky, the launch was forced to be interrupted 27 minutes before the scheduled launch.
Toru Tokunaga, head of the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-IIA Launch Unit, said, “High-altitude winds hit launch constraints that were set to ensure that they were not affected by falling debris outside of pre-warned areas. He said.
According to Michio Kawakami, director of safety at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), strong winds of nearly 108 kilometers per hour (67 miles per hour) were observed at altitudes of 5,000 to 15,000 meters (16,400 to 49,200 feet). He added that multiple typhoons could form across Japan, affecting wind conditions.
A new launch date has not been set, but due to necessary procedures such as refueling, it will not be Thursday at the latest, Tokunaga said. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and JAXA said the launch could take place on Sept. 15 at the latest.
The rocket was scheduled to launch Monday morning from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan. It has already been postponed twice since last week due to bad weather. Japan’s H-IIA launch will be the 47th.
“Moon Sniper” Mission
The rocket is equipped with JAXA’s Smart Lander for Lunar Exploration (SLIM) and will be the first Japanese spacecraft to land on the moon. Tokyo-based startup ISpace’s (9348.T) lander Hakuto-R Mission 1 crashed on the moon in April.
JAXA was scheduled to begin lunar orbit landings on SLIM in January-February 2024 after Monday’s launch, aiming to follow up on the success of India’s Chandrayaan 3 lunar exploration mission earlier this month.
SLIM mission called “Moon Sniper” ask for According to JAXA, it will be able to achieve a high precision landing within 100 meters of its lunar target, a technological leap from the traditional multi-kilometer lunar landing precision.
The rocket also carries the X-ray Imaging Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency.
Jointly developed by JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the H-IIA is Japan’s flagship space rocket, with 45 successful launches in 46 trials since 2001. But JAXA postponed the launch after its new medium-lift H3 rocket failed to debut in March. In order to investigate the cause, H-IIA No. 47 was launched over several months.
Despite its goal of sending astronauts to the moon’s surface in the late 2020s, Japan’s space mission has faced recent setbacks, with a failure to launch its Epsilon rocket in October 2022. An engine explosion occurred during a test last month.
(This story has been refiled to restore the “a” deleted in paragraph 1)
Reported by Kantaro Komiya and Rocky Swift.Editing: Kim Coghill and Jerry Doyle
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