Japan claims spacecraft SLIM's historic lunar landing achieved, but is still 'checking status'

Japan’s space agency on Friday said that its unmanned spacecraft has landed on the Moon, but that the space agency is 'still checking its status’. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, made the historic touchdown on the lunar surface at around 12:20 a.m. Tokyo time. SLIM is a lightweight spacecraft, about the size of a passenger vehicle, and is using the ‘pinpoint landing’ technology which promises a far greater control than any other previous moon landing.

Landing on lunar surface ‘a breathless, numbing, 20 minutes of terror’

Also known as the ‘Moon Sniper,' the lander's contact with the lunar surface implies that Japan will become only the fifth country to pull the successful moon mission after India, China, US, Russia. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced in a statement that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, SLIM, commenced its crucial and much anticipated descent to the rocky lunar surface at midnight on Friday (1500 GMT).

[SLIM Moon landing: live broadcast Jan. 19, 2024 from 23:00 JST]
A live broadcast during the moon landing operations for the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) and press conference will be streamed live on the#JAXA YouTube channel #SLIMlivehttps://t.co/QI2KU8peO2

— JAXA(Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) (@JAXA_en)

Approximately 20 minutes after the touchdown, the spacecraft will become a hallmark of whether the landers can descend on the moon with an unprecedented precision despite the challenging conditions. “The start of the deceleration to the landing on the Moon’s surface is expected to be a breathless, numbing 20 minutes of terror,” Kenji Kushiki, the subproject manager of the SLIM mission, said in a statement. 

“Nowadays, there has been an increase in the knowledge of target astronomical objects and the details which should be studied have grown more specific so that high accuracy landings near the target of study have become necessary,” JAXA said.

The lander will touch down less than 100 metres from a predetermined target on the moon. The successful landing has been crucial for a transition from an era of “landing where we can” towards one of “landing where we want” for future missions. Japan, in November 2022, abandoned its attempts to land the lunar probe Omotenashi on the moon. In April 2023, a Japan lost contact with its craft after making a “hard landing” coupled with a failed lift-off in May.