Japan Launches Spacecraft Landing on the Moon

Japan has launched a rocket carrying its lunar exploration spacecraft as the country looks to become the world’s fifth to land on the moon.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the homegrown H-IIA rocket took off from Tanegashima space center in southern japan on Thursday and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM).

Dubbed the “moon sniper”, japan aims to land slim within 100 metres of its target site on the lunar surface. That is much less than the usual range of several kilometres.

The H-IIA rocket launched on Thursday also carried the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency.

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The $100m mission is expected to reach the moon by February next year. Only four nations have successfully landed on the moon – the United States, Russia, China and India.

Past Japanese attempts have also gone wrong, including last year when it sent a lunar probe named Omotenashi as part of the United States’ Artemis 1 mission. The size of a backpack, Omotenashi would have been the world’s smallest Moon lander, but JAXA lost contact with the spacecraft and scrubbed a landing in November.

The Japanese Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, made by startup ispace, also crashed in April as it attempted to descend to the lunar surface.

David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University in the US, said XRISM is significant for delivering insight into the properties of hot plasma, or the superheated matter that makes up much of the universe.