The spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit.
The Japanese robotic lander SLIM has arrived in lunar orbit. This happened on Christmas Day, December 25th, as planned. The spacecraft entered lunar orbit at 02:51 a.m. Eastern Time.
The Space portal writes about this.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is pleased to announce that the SLIM spacecraft was successfully launched into lunar orbit on December 25 at 16:51.
The spaceship is in an elliptical orbit. It takes 6.4 hours to circle the Moon, approaching 373 miles (600 kilometers) from the lunar surface at its closest point and reaching 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) at its farthest.
This milestone allows SLIM to reach its goal of attempting to land on the Moon on January 19th. Success in this attempt will be historic; To date, only four countries – the USSR, the USA, China and India – have made a soft landing of a spacecraft on the Moon.
SLIM, 8.8 feet (2.7 meters) long, launched September 6 along with the powerful X-ray space telescope XRISM.
Japanese spacecraft were deployed into low-Earth orbit, and XRISM remains there today. But SLIM left our planet's gravity well on September 30, beginning a long, circuitous, and energy-efficient path to the Moon.
This mission ended today when SLIM entered lunar orbit. The probe will now begin preparing for its landing attempt, during which it will attempt to meet the Lunar Sniper requirements.
“By creating the SLIM lander, people will make a qualitative shift in the direction of being able to land where we want, and not just where it’s easy to land, as was the case before,” the company’s press service noted.
Recall that the atmosphere of Mars has inflated fourfold.
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