Last month, India became the fourth nation to achieve a moon landing. Japan wants to be No. 5, and this week it launched a $100 million mission that it hopes will help it achieve that goal. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said its H-IIA rocket took off Thursday morning from the Tanegashima Space Center, with a lunar lander aboard that's set to touch down on the moon by February, reports CNN. What makes the lightweight Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM (aka the "Moon Sniper") unusual is that Japan hopes to land it within 100 meters, or about 330 feet, from its target site—a much narrower window than the usual several miles.
With SLIM, "humans will make a qualitative shift [toward] being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land," JAXA said before the launch, per Al Jazeera. That, in turn, will make it possible "to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the moon." Also along for the ride on the Japanese rocket: the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), an X-ray satellite that "will measure the speed and makeup of what lies between galaxies," per the AP.
XRISM was sent into orbit around Earth 13 minutes after liftoff. Thursday's launch comes after multiple recent postponements due to bad weather, as well as a series of failures for the Japanese space program. The BBC notes that in November, JAXA was forced to call off a moon-landing mission after it lost contact with its spacecraft. Then, in April, a private Japanese company lost contact with its own spacecraft in an attempted landing. A pair of test rocket launches this year also went south. In addition to Japan and India, only the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China have pulled off successful moon landings. (More Japan stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
