Japan has been exploring the solar system for decades. Whatever the ultimate outcome of the SLIM mission is announced to be, the Japanese space agency, JAXA, has an assortment of scientific missions that continue to operate near and far from Earth.
It is the only country with a spacecraft currently orbiting Venus, the second planet from the sun. The Akatsuki mission to study Venus’s weather launched in 2010, but struggled with engine malfunctions that delayed its arrival. Once it managed to orbit Venus in 2015, its instruments observed a sideways smile-shaped feature that stretched across Venus’s atmosphere from pole to pole. Researchers continue to use data collected by the orbiter to study the planet.
Another active mission, Hayabusa2, has already completed its primary objective, collecting asteroid samples from Ryugu, a near-Earth asteroid, and returning them to Earth in December 2020. The spacecraft then headed to a secondary destination, an asteroid named 1998 KY26, which it will reach and study in 2031.
The BepiColombo mission, jointly operated with the European Space Agency, is on its way to Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet. Orbiting Mercury is challenging, and requires a series of flybys to slow the spacecraft. Once this circuitous journey is completed in late 2025, BepiColombo will split into a pair of spacecraft — Mio, built by JAXA, and the European Mercury Planetary Orbiter — to observe the planet from different orbits.
Japan has other space missions planned as well.
A mission to Mars, MMX, is scheduled to launch in 2026 to study the red planet’s moons. It will try to land on the larger of the two, Phobos, to collect samples and return them to Earth for study. It may use some of the SLIM mission’s technology to accomplish that feat.
Another spacecraft, DESTINY+, could launch next year to study the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which is the source of the Geminid meteor shower. And JAXA is collaborating with India’s space agency on a rover called LUPEX that could explore the moon’s surface.
