Japan says spacecraft lands on moon, becomes world’s 5th country to do so

Subject: S&T

Section: Space Technology

Context:

Japan became the fifth country in history to reach the moon when one of its spacecrafts without astronauts successfully made a soft landing on the lunar surface early Saturday.

More on news:

Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM’s) small rovers were launched as planned and that data was being transmitted back to Earth.
Japan follows the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India in reaching the moon.
A landing of such precision would be a world’s first and would be crucial technology for a sustainable, long-term and accurate space probe system.

About SLIM nicknamed as “the Moon Sniper”:

SLIM was launched on a Mitsubishi Heavy H2A rocket in September.
It initially orbited Earth and entered lunar orbit on Dec. 25.
SLIM is aiming to hit a very small target
It is a lightweight spacecraft about the size of a passenger vehicle.
SLIM was carrying two small autonomous probes — lunar excursion vehicles LEV-1 and LEV-2
LEV-1 is equipped with an antenna and a camera and is tasked with recording SLIM’s landing.
LEV-2 is a ball-shaped rover equipped with two cameras, developed by JAXA together with Sony, toymaker Tomy and Doshisha University.
It was using “pinpoint landing” technology that promises far greater control than any previous moon landing.
Most previous probes have used landing zones about 10 kilometers (six miles) wide whereas SLIM was aiming at a target of just 100 meters (330 feet).

Other missions of Japan:

Hayabusa was a robotic spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to return a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa to Earth for further analysis.
Hayabusa2 is an asteroid sample-return mission operated by the Japanese state space agency JAXA. It is a successor to the Hayabusa mission, which returned asteroid samples for the first time in June 2010
The Artemis program is a Moon exploration program that is led by the United States NASA and was formally established in 2017 via Space Policy Directive 1.
The Artemis program is intended to reestablish a human presence on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972.