Japan Send Moon Lander and Launches an X-Ray Telescope | Sep 6, 2023
Channel: Hacking Space Frontier
Date: 2023-09-08

On Thursday morning in Japan, a bus-size telescope called XRISM with X-Ray vision was launched into space, accompanied by a robotic moon lander named SLIM. These two missions, XRISM and SLIM, embarked on separate journeys. XRISM's mission is to study various high-energy cosmic phenomena by observing X-Ray radiation from an orbit 350 miles above Earth. It will investigate the accretion of material around black holes, the intense plasma within galaxy clusters, and the remnants of massive star explosions using spectroscopy to analyze changes in the brightness of sources at different wavelengths. This mission is a collaboration between Japan's space agency, JAXA, and NASA, with contributions from the European Space Agency. XRISM is a rebuilt version of the Hitomi mission, which failed shortly after its 2016 launch, and it aims to provide crucial insights into the universe's most energetic events.