Japan’s “Moon Sniper” mission has blasted off on its mission to make Japan the fifth country to touch down safely on the lunar surface, and the first to do it with unusual precision.
The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) got its Sniper nickname because it is designed to land within 100 metres of a specific target on the surface – much less than the usual range of several kilometres.
Watched by 35,000 people online, the H-IIA rocket carrying Slim lifted off early on Thursday from the southern island of Tanegashima carrying the lander, which is expected to touch down on the lunar surface in early 2024.
The Slim probe and the XRISM space research satellite developed with the US and European space agencies both separated soon afterwards.
Only the United States, Russia, China and as of last month India have successfully landed a probe on the moon. There have been two failed Japanese missions – one public and one private.
“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,” the Japanese space agency, 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”, the agency said.
The XRISM satellite launched on the same rocket will perform “high-resolution X-ray spectroscopic observations of the hot gas plasma wind that blows through the galaxies in the universe”, according to Jaxa.
India in August landed a craft near the Moon’s south pole, a historic triumph for its low-cost space programme. Its success came a few days after a Russian probe crashed in the same region, and four years after a previous Indian attempt failed at the last moment.
In 2022 Japan sent a lunar probe named Omotenashi as part of the US Artemis 1 mission run by the US. The size of a backpack, Omotenashi would have been the world’s smallest moon lander but it was lost.
In April, Japanese start-up ispace failed in an ambitious attempt to become the first private company to land on the Moon, losing communication with its craft after what it described as a “hard landing”.
Japan has had problems with its launch rockets, with failures after liftoff of the next-generation H3 in March and the normally reliable solid-fuel Epsilon in October 2022. In July, the test of an Epsilon S rocket, an improved version of the Epsilon, ended in an explosion 50 seconds after ignition.
With Agence France-Presse