Japan made history on Friday, becoming only the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the Moon. The US, the Soviet Union, China and India are the only other nations to have accomplished the feat so far.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) probe, dubbed the “Moon Sniper”, landed on the slope of a crater just south of the lunar equator using “pinpoint technology”.
The craft’s landing site was an area within 100 metres (330 feet) of a spot on the surface, far tighter than the usual landing zone of several kilometres.
“No other nation has achieved this. Proving Japan has this [pinpoint] technology brings us a huge advantage in upcoming international missions like Artemis,” said Shinichiro Sakai, JAXA SLIM project manager. The pinpoint technology has been previously used by Japan to successfully land probes on two asteroids.
