Countdown begins for Japan’s historic moon landing

Tension is building as Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) prepares for a landing on the moon in the closely watched last stage of the spacecraft’s four-month journey to the moon.

If successful, Japan will become only the fifth country to land a craft on the moon, after the U.S., Russia, China and India. It will also be the first to succeed in a high-precision landing, with an accuracy of less than 100 meters, much smaller than the tens of kilometers typically sought in conventional missions.

But a successful touchdown is no sure bet.

“The start of the deceleration to the landing on the moon’s surface is expected to be a breathless, numbing 20 minutes of terror,” Kushiki Kenji, the sub-project manager of the SLIM mission, had said in a statement in August.

At 12:20 a.m., the spacecraft nicknamed the “Moon Sniper” is expected to land on the sloped grounds near the Shioli crater, to the west of Mare Nectaris on the near side of the moon.

The touchdown on the moon — which has one-sixth of the Earth’s gravity — is likely to give a much-needed boost to Japan’s space program, which has experienced a series of setbacks in recent years, including the launch failure of its H3 flagship rocket in March 2023.

SLIM’s onboard computer is equipped with maps of the craters previously recorded by the Kaguya mission and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. As SLIM makes a descent on Saturday, it will snap images of the lunar surface with onboard cameras and match images with those of the onboard maps to identify the craft’s exact location.

A model of a transformable lunar surface robot known as SORA-Q installed on the the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM).
| JAXA / VIA AFP-JIJI