Tomorrow is a big day for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The space agency will try to land the Smart Lander for Lunar Exploration (SLIM) on the moon. If the mission is successful, Japan will become the fifth country to set foot on the moon and the third this century after China and India.

SLIM is expected to begin descending at 10 a.m. Friday (midnight Saturday in Japan) and touch down 20 minutes later. This groundbreaking mission to the lunar surface for JAXA was designed to demonstrate a precision moon landing; This is a level of precision not demonstrated in any other mission. It is expected to land on the Moon within 100 meters (330 feet) of a specific target area.

The landing pad of the Apollo 11 Eagle lander was a 20 by 5-kilometer (12 by 3.1-mile) ellipse and required manual adjustments by astronauts at the last minute. SLIM uses software first developed for facial recognition to know exactly where you are. Thanks to data collected by JAXA’s SELENE mission (also known as Kaguya), SLIM needs to know where it is and where it needs to go for a proper landing. The Moon Sniper nickname is accurate.

“SLIM’s big goal is to prove high-precision landing… to achieve ‘landing where we want’ on the lunar surface, not ‘landing where we can,'” JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa said at a press conference in September. when the mission starts.

All going well, SLIM will launch two rovers. The first will move with a jumping mechanism equipped with cameras and various scientific payloads. The second is a rover weighing just 250 grams (9 ounces) that can change shape to best adapt to lunar conditions.

Reaching and landing on the Moon is no easy task, even if we don’t come close to the task of doing so with the high precision expected from SLIM. In November 2022, JAXA’s OMOTENASHI lander was lost and failed to reach the Moon. In April 2023, a Japanese startup attempted to become the first private company to land on the moon, but also lost contact with the spacecraft. The promised Russian return to the moon in August ended with the spacecraft crashing onto the surface, creating an entirely new crater photographed by NASA.

America’s private Peregrine-One mission also failed to reach the moon and burned up when it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere on Thursday, January 18.