Japan has launched a rocket carrying a 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”, JAXA aims to land SLIM within 100 metres (328 feet) of its target site on the lunar surface.
That is much less than the usual range of several kilometres.
“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land,” JAXA said before the launch. “By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the Moon.”
Globally, “there are no previous instances of pinpoint landing on celestial bodies with significant gravity such as the Moon”, JAXA added.
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.
India landed its spacecraft last month near the moon’s unexplored south pole in a historic triumph for its low-cost space programme.
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.
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