Japan launches ‘moon sniper’ lunar lander into space

TOKYO - Japan launched its

lunar exploration spacecraft

on Thursday aboard a home-grown H-IIA rocket, clearing a path for it to become the world’s fifth country to land on the Moon in early 2024.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) said the rocket took off from Tanegashima Space Centre in southern Japan as planned, and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim). Unfavourable weather led to

three postponements in a week

in August.

Dubbed the “Moon sniper”

, Japan aims to land Slim within 100m of its target site on the lunar surface. The US$100 million (S$136 million) mission is expected to reach the Moon by February.

“The big objective of Slim is to prove the high-accuracy landing ... to achieve ‘landing where we want’ on the lunar surface, rather than ‘landing where we can’,” Jaxa president Hiroshi Yamakawa told a news conference.

Hours after the launch on Thursday, Jaxa said it picked up signals from Slim showing it was operating normally.

The launch comes two weeks after

India became the fourth nation

to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the unexplored lunar South Pole. Around the same time, Russia’s Luna-25 lander crashed while approaching the Moon.

Two earlier attempts by Japan to land on the Moon

failed in the past year.

Jaxa lost contact with the Omotenashi lander and scrubbed an attempted landing in November. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, made by Japanese start-up ispace, crashed in April as it attempted to descend to the lunar surface.

Slim is set to touch down on the Moon’s near side close to Mare Nectaris, a lunar sea that, viewed from Earth, appears as a dark spot. After landing, the craft aims to analyse the composition of olivine rocks near the sites in search of clues about the origin of the Moon. No lunar rover is loaded on Slim.

The H-IIA rocket is also carrying the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (Xrism) satellite, a joint project of Jaxa, Nasa and the European Space Agency. The satellite aims to observe plasma winds flowing through the universe that scientists see as key to helping understand the evolution of stars and galaxies.

Ground stations in Hawaii and Japan received signals from Xrism soon after the launch confirming that the satellite’s solar panels had successfully deployed, Jaxa said.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries made the rocket and operated the launch, which marked the 47th H-IIA rocket Japan has launched since 2001, bringing the vehicle’s success rate close to 98 per cent.

Jaxa had suspended the launch of H-IIA carrying Slim for several months while it investigated the failure of its new medium-lift H3 rocket during its

debut in March

.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in a social media post after the launch on Thursday that developing flagship rockets is essential to Japan’s independent space activities. “We’ll build up the momentum towards the successful re-launch of the H3 rocket,” he posted on the social media X, previously known as Twitter.

Japan’s space missions have faced other recent setbacks, with the launch failure of the Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test in July.

Jaxa plans a joint lunar polar exploration mission with the Indian Space Research Organisation beyond 2025, in which Japan’s H3 rocket will carry India’s next lunar lander into space.

The country also aims to send an astronaut to the Moon’s surface in the latter half of the 2020s as part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Artemis programme. REUTERS