The Land of the Rising Sun is definitely a country where there is plenty of technology involved, no doubt about it. The thing is, it happens to be able to balance modernism and tradition in such a delicate manner, and Japan intends to be the fourth country in the world to accomplish an unmanned moon landing, now how about that? The Japan government’s space policy committee recently updated the schedule of their space exploration program, where they targeted 2019 as the year to send an unmanned lander to the moon. Of course, the lander has not been developed yet, as it is tipped to kick off from 2016 onward.
If Japan is successful, it would make them the next country after China in 2013 to carry out a successful unmanned moon landing, with the U.S. and the former Soviet Union being the other two countries, of course. Heading to the moon without a human is not the main objective of the upcoming mission, as Japan’s lunar lander will be equipped to land within 100 meters of its initial mark – which would make it the most accurate yet, whereas the others missed by a rather wide margin.
Japan hopes to make use of various technologies, including those from a facial recognition system which will observe the surface of the moon so that it can perform the relevant adjustments before “touchdown”, so to speak, and knowing their prowess in technology, one would be hard pressed to bet against their success by the time 2019 comes around.
Filed in . Read more about Japan and Science. Source: blogs.wsj