Delhi: After Chandrayaan-3, now Japanese Space Agency launches SLIM probe for ‘Moon Sniper’ mission.

Japan launched a lunar exploration spacecraft on sep 6, aboard a homegrown H-IIA rocket, hoping to become the world’s fifth country to land on the moon early next year.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the rocket took off from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan as planned and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). Unfavourable weather led to three postponements in a week last month.

SLIM is a small spacecraft, measuring just 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) high, 8.8 feet (2.7 m) long and 5.6 feet (1.7 m) wide. At liftoff, it tipped the scales at about 1,540 pounds (700 kilograms), but roughly 70% of that weight was propellant. SLIM will take a long, looping and fuel-efficient route to the moon, finally reaching lunar orbit three to four months from now. It will then eye the lunar surface for another month or so before attempting a touchdown inside Shioli Crater, a 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) impact feature that lies at 13 degrees south latitude, on the moon’s near side.The probe aims to land within 330 feet (100 m) of a target point within Shioli Crater — a more precise touchdown than previous lunar landers have attempted. The goal is to demonstrate pinpoint-landing tech that could open the moon, and other celestial bodies, to more extensive exploration.

“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land, as had been the case before,” JAXA officials wrote in the mission description. “By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the moon.” Success by SLIM would therefore be historic. Just four nations have soft-landed a probe on the moon to date — the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India. India put its name on this exclusive list just last month, when its Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down near the lunar south pole.