The activities of the Japanese space organization JAXA were followed with great interest today in Dwingeloo with the CAMRAS telescope. They managed to park the lunar lander SLIM on the surface of the moon at 4:21 PM Dutch time.
“It is a special day. Japan is now the fifth country to have carried out a moon landing,” says Tammo Jan Dijkema of CAMRAS, the volunteer organization that manages, maintains and uses the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope.
In Dwingeloo today he followed the Japanese moon landing. “Normally we listen to the sounds of the stars and the Milky Way here, but now we listen to a lunar lander. The signal is quite weak, so you need a fairly sensitive antenna to receive that. And the radio telescope has a very large dish with which we that can pick up weak signals,” says Dijkema.
The operations of the lunar lander were translated into a graph in Dwingeloo. The line that appeared on Dijkema’s screen was the changing tone frequency of the lander. “We could see exactly how fast the lunar lander was going. Whether it was going faster, softer or as fast as the moon. You can compare this method with the way the police measure the speed of a car. We are just sitting in the front row for a moon landing. We can’t really see it, but we can observe it.”
Dijkema works in daily life at ASTRON, the Dutch institute for radio astronomy in Dwingeloo. He took a day off to follow the moon landing in this way. “We are all volunteers here. And we are all affiliated with the CAMRAS foundation, which manages the telescope.”
The Japanese lunar lander is not yet working properly. There is a problem with the solar panels, it was announced at a press conference.