Moon Sniper: Japan aims anew at lunar landing

Tokyo: After Chandrayaan-3's success, Japan's space agency is set to launch a lander and an X-ray mission to the moon on Monday.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) aims to achieve a lightweight probe system on a small scale and use the pinpoint landing technology necessary for future lunar probes.

If successful, Japan will become just the fifth country to successfully soft-land on the moon, after Russia, US, China and India.

The mission will also place the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) in a satellite that will help scientists observe plasma in stars and galaxies.

The mission, originally scheduled to take off on Saturday, was postponed to Monday due to bad weather. It will now launch to the moon on JAXA's H2-A rocket from Yoshinobu Launch Complex at the JAXA Tanegashima Space Center.

Japanese officials say the idea is to go from an era of "landing where we can" to "landing where we want" on a celestial body with gravity, such as the moon. The moon's gravity is about one-sixth of Earth's gravity — its pull is weaker — which is why you can jump about six times as high on the moon as you can on Earth. And that has an impact on how spacecraft land on the moon's surface.

But it's about more than that. Since the beginning of human moon exploration in the 1960s, and the advent of advanced satellites and telescopes and other camera technology, researchers have gathered masses of high-definition images and other data, such as information about the moon's atmosphere. So, we know more about the moon's constitution, including where we are likely to find water. And scientists want to land exactly where there is water, such as the south pole. Or, if they are interested in a specific rock on the moon, it's important that a spacecraft can land very close by on a flat piece of land.

The landing precision of conventional landers can be anywhere between "several and a dozen" kilometers. That's according to the Japanese space agency, JAXA, and its Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. Pinpoint landers aim to bring that range down to about 100 meters (330 feet).

SLIM has a dry weight of 200 kg and a boxlike shape and dimensions of 2.4 meters by 1.7 meters by 2.7 meters. The objective is to test lightweight vehicles to facilitate more frequent missions to moons and planets.

On the moon's surface, a multiband spectral camera will investigate the composition of rocks.