Japan 'planning an unmanned moon landing by 2015'

Japan plans to follow up its first lunar satellite orbit this month by sending an unmanned probe to land on the moon by 2015, news reports said today.

The Space Activities Commission of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology decided on Friday to aim to land a Selene-2 probe on the moon’s surface by 2015, Japanese major daily Asahi reported today. Another daily Mainichi carried a similar report.

The landing would be a follow-up to the launch on September 14 of the Selenological and Engineering Explorer – or Selene – probe for what officials call the largest mission to the moon since the US Apollo project.

The 2015 moon probe – expected to cost about 50bn yen (€303m) – would consist of an unmanned lander, a rover to study the lunar surface and a small satellite to transfer data, according to the reports.

Officials of the ministry and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, were not available for comment.

The reports follow China’s successful launch on Wednesday of its first lunar probe – a leap forward in the Asian space race. India is likely to join the rivalry soon, with plans to send its own lunar probe into space in April.

Last January, JAXA gave up on a mission to land on the moon’s surface. The Lunar-A probe, originally scheduled to lift off in 1995, was to plant two seismic sensors on the lunar surface, but development of the penetrator probes took so long that the mission’s mother ship fell into disrepair.

On October 5, officials said the Selene probe had gone into orbit round the moon. Its mission involves placing a main satellite in orbit at an altitude of about 100km (60 miles) and deploying the two smaller satellites in polar orbits. Researchers will use data gathered by the probes to study the moon’s origin and evolution.