Japan schedules August launch for ‘Moon Sniper’ lander

Japan's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has named August 26 as its intended launch date for a lunar lander it hopes will improve humanity's ability to touch down on other worlds – as well as an astronomical observation that might help us understand how they form.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon is also known as the"Moon Sniper" thanks to its use of technologies that JAXA claims"make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land." If JAXA can pull that off, it believes"it will become possible to land on planets even more resource scarce than the Moon."

The sobriquet"sniper" has been applied because the craft is equipped with high-resolution cameras and an image processing algorithm. As it swings into lunar orbit, it will be able to recognize craters and measure its position, then decide on an optimal spot to land. JAXA expects it to touch down within 100 meters of its preferred target.

That accuracy is important, because it means future missions can send instruments to specific locations, instead of having to design missions around the places where landing will be easiest. As the guy said – we do this not because it's easy, but because it's hard. SLIM is therefore small – 2.7x1.7 meters – and will weigh 210kg at touchdown. That small size, JAXA asserts, is important because the kind of future missions it's envisioning may require purpose-specific payloads.

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