14 DAY TRIAL // Japan announced this week the launch date for the first lunar orbiter, announced JAXA, the Japanese space agency. After many delays, the mission, called SELENE - Selenological and Engineering Explorer - will be launched on August 16.
The mission costs $269 million, and will launch a probe aboard an H-2A rocket, the standard Japanese space shuttle, and will take place at a space center on the remote southern Japan island of Tanegashima. Four years behind schedule, the Moon exploration program now finally has a definitive launch date.
Japan's space exploration program is surprisingly slow-paced, and other less technologically advanced countries have much more developed operations. For example, the Chinese Space Administration declared that the first step in Moon exploration will take off later this year. It's a Moon orbiter, part of an ambitious Chinese space exploration plan.
There was a previous attempt to send a lunar orbiter from JAXA, called LUNAR-A, scheduled to have been launched in 2004, but it was repeatedly postponed due to financial and technical difficulties, and was eventually canceled.
Now, SELENE wants to be a more aggressive approach, consisting of a main satellite to be placed in orbit at an altitude of about 60 miles, and two other smaller satellites, which will probably be deployed in orbits around Moon's poles.
SELENE will carry 13 instruments including imagers, a radar sounder, laser altimeter, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and gamma-ray spectrometer to study the origin, evolution, and tectonics of the Moon from orbit.
The main orbiter will hold its position for around a year and will gather data about the moon's origin and evolution. Future manned space missions have not been excluded by the Japanese space agency, but these will have to wait for a decade or so, since for now, Japan has no manned space program, although Japanese have flown aboard NASA's space shuttle and a Japanese journalist rode on a Russian spacecraft.