Last month, India became the fourth nation to achieve a moon landing. Japan wants to be No. 5, and this week it launched a $100 million mission that it hopes will help it achieve that goal. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said its H-IIA rocket took off Thursday morning from the Tanegashima Space Center, with a lunar lander aboard that’s set to touch down on the moon by February, according to a report from CNN. What makes the lightweight Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM (aka the “Moon Sniper”) unusual is that Japan hopes to land it within 100 meters, or about 330 feet, from its target site—a much narrower window than the usual several miles.
With SLIM, “humans will make a qualitative shift [toward] being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land,” JAXA said before the launch, as reported by Al Jazeera. This breakthrough will enable future missions to land on planets that are even more resource-scarce than the moon. The Japanese rocket also carries the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), which is an X-ray satellite designed to “measure the speed and makeup of what lies between galaxies,” according to the Associated Press.
XRISM was sent into orbit around Earth 13 minutes after liftoff. This launch follows several postponements due to inclement weather and previous failures for the Japanese space program. In November, JAXA had to abort a moon-landing mission after losing contact with its spacecraft. In April, a private Japanese company also lost contact with its own spacecraft during an attempted landing. Additionally, a pair of test rocket launches earlier this year experienced failures. Besides Japan and India, only the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China have successfully landed on the moon. (Read more Japan stories.)
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