Shortly after India successfully landed Chandrayaan-3 on the southern polar area of the Moon, Japan is preparing to launch its own ambitious lunar mission. This mission, named the “Smart Lander for Investigating Moon” or SLIM lander, has earned the nickname “Moon Sniper” due to its exceptional precision and accuracy in landing.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is working on the SLIM project (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon). Their goal is to create a small and lightweight probe that can land very precisely on the Moon, which will be important for upcoming lunar missions.

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What is Pinpoint Landing?

Pinpoint landing means shifting from just landing wherever we can to actually landing exactly where we want to be on a space object with gravity, like the Moon. Unlike traditional approaches that aimed to land spacecraft wherever possible, SLIM’s primary objective is to achieve pinpoint accuracy in its landings.

This marks a significant advancement, especially when considering celestial bodies with gravitational forces like the Moon. The mission’s goal is no longer just to land where feasible, but to transition to a new paradigm where landings can be precisely targeted on specific locations.

The Moon has much weaker gravity than Earth, only about one-sixth as strong. This makes landing spacecraft there tricky. But scientists have made progress by using better satellites, telescopes, and high-quality pictures to learn more about what the Moon’s surface is like and how it’s made.

Knowing about the Moon is super important, especially finding things like water, especially at the Moon’s south pole. And being really good at landing in exact spots helps us get to specific places we want to study, like certain cool rocks.

Normal spacecraft that land on the Moon aren’t very accurate, maybe landing several to dozens of kilometers away from where they meant to. But this Slim spacecraft is amazing because it aims to land just 100 meters away from where it wants to go.

More about SLIM lander:

Slim is a small and light spacecraft, weighing about 200 kilograms and being about 2.4 meters by 1.7 meters by 2.7 meters in size. This makes it easier to send it on more trips to different places in space. It has tools like radar and cameras to help it figure out where it is and fix its position while landing.

When Slim reaches the Moon, it will use a special camera to look at the Moon rocks and find out their composition. There’s also a small robot called SORA-Q that will come out of Slim and explore a bit.

Slim is getting ready to launch on Monday at 9:26 am in Japan. It will travel for about three to four months before getting close to the Moon. Then it will take about another month to start landing on the Moon. This is a big deal for Japan because they had some problems before when they tried this. Now they’re trying again with Slim.

The Slim mission shows that Japan really wants to explore space and get better at landing on the Moon. This time, they’re using a smart spacecraft that should land in exactly the right spot.