Japan is preparing for its first moon touchdown. The Good Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is scheduled to the touch down on the lunar floor on 19 January. If all goes nicely, it will make Japan the fifth nation to land a spacecraft on the moon, following the US, the Soviet Union, China and India.

SLIM launched in September 2023 and took a swooping, elongated path to the moon to avoid wasting on gasoline. It entered lunar orbit in December, and since then it has been taking pictures of the floor and slowly decreasing its altitude in preparation for touchdown.

The spacecraft’s touchdown know-how is awfully exact, garnering it the nickname “moon sniper”. It’s designed to match the photographs from its on-board cameras to information from different lunar spacecraft to find out its location, then autonomously navigate to its precise touchdown spot. “[It] is predicted to be a breathless, numbing 20 minutes of terror,” stated Kushiki Kenji, one of many mission’s managers on the Japan Aerospace Exploration Company (JAXA), in a statement.

If this works, it’ll set the stage for future missions to land precisely the place they’re meant to as a substitute of inside just a few tens of sq. kilometres of the popular spot, as they do now. “Lunar orbiters… have offered massive quantities of high-resolution commentary information of the lunar floor,” Kushiki stated. “Due to this fact, curiosity in lunar science and useful resource exploration has shifted from ‘someplace on the Moon’s floor’ to ‘that rock subsequent to this particular crater’.”

As soon as the spacecraft lands, it’ll launch a pair of rovers, every with a brand new and unusual technique for getting across the lunar floor. Lunar Tour Automobile 1 (LEV-1) is designed to hop round as a substitute of trundling alongside on wheels like conventional rovers, and LEV-2 is a sphere just a little smaller than a tennis ball, designed by a toy producer to roll throughout the bottom and take footage. The lander itself additionally carries scientific devices to analyze the world across the crater that it’s focusing on for its touchdown.

This touchdown is an element of a bigger worldwide effort to discover the moon. India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander reached the lunar floor in August 2023, however there have additionally been a sequence of failures: the Japanese firm ispace despatched a lander that crashed final April, the Russian Luna 25 craft did the identical in August and extra just lately the US firm Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander suffered a gasoline leak that led to a failure to get to the moon. If this mission succeeds, it might mark the second that lunar exploration will get again heading in the right direction.