Japan on Thursday (September 7) launched a rocket that plans to become the country’s first successful moon lander, as seen in live footage shared by the country’s space agency.
The H2-A rocket, carrying the precision “Moon Sniper” lander, blasted off at 8:42 a.m. (2342 GMT Wednesday) and is expected to land on the lunar surface in four to six months
The rocket was launched from Tanegashima in southern Japan after being postponed three times due to bad weather and gathering nearly 35,000 online viewers.
The rocket is also carrying a research satellite developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The lunar lander was launched by Japan just a month after India’s rover landed near the moon’s south pole, in what was seen as a historic victory for the country.
Japan’s compact lander, officially known as the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM), is designed to successfully land within 100 meters of a specific target on the lunar surface.
“Building the SLIM Lander will make a qualitative change toward being able to land where we want humans to, and not where it’s easy to land,” JAXA said before the launch.
“By achieving this, it will be possible to land on a planet even more resource-poor than the Moon. There are no previous examples of pinpoint landings on celestial bodies with significant gravity such as the global Moon,” it added.
So far, India, the US, Russia and China have managed to land their spacecraft on the surface of the Moon and India has become the first country to do so at the South Pole. All of Japan’s previous attempts, including a lunar probe sent by Japan last year as part of the US Artemis program, named Omotenashi, have failed.
