According to space agency, Japan's "Moon Sniper" made a successful "pin-point" landing

Landing within 100 meters (330 feet) of a designated landing spot was the aim of the unmanned Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), also known as the "Moon Sniper" due to its pin-point technology.

Compared to the typical landing zone, which is several kilometers, that is much more precise.

"SLIM succeeded in a pin-point soft landing... the landing point is confirmed to be 55 metres away from the target point," JAXA, the Japanese space agency, stated.

Japan is now just the fifth country to land on the moon, following the US, the USSR, China, and India, with this Saturday's soft landing.

However, the lack of power generated by the lightweight spacecraft's solar batteries put a dampener on the festivities.

When the sun's angle changed, JAXA chose to turn the craft off with 12 percent of its power left, allowing for a potential recovery.

"If sunlight hits the Moon from the west in the future, we believe there's a possibility of power generation, and we're currently preparing for restoration," JAXA stated this week.

Mission Control downloaded technical and image data during the craft's descent and from the lunar surface before turning off SLIM.

The first color photos from the mission, released by JAXA on Thursday, feature the mission's SLIM craft sitting intact at a small angle on the rocky grey surface, with distant lunar slopes rising.

The objective of the mission was to reach a crater thought to contain exposed surface layers of the Moon's mantle, which is the normally deep inner layer beneath its crust.

The goal of JAXA's rock analysis is to provide insight into the Moon's potential water reserves, which could be important for establishing bases there in the future or as potential stops on a journey to Mars.

Two probes, one equipped with a transmitter and the other intended to roll around the lunar surface beaming images back to Earth, successfully separated from SLIM on Saturday.

A little larger than a tennis ball, this shape-shifting mini-rover was co-developed by the company that created the Transformer toys. JAXA released this image of it on Thursday.

Fifty years after the first human landing on Moon, governments and private companies have launched several lunar missions, including SLIM.

Nevertheless, there are many technical issues, and this month the US experienced two setbacks in its ambitious Moon programs.

Additionally, Japan has had two failed private and one public lunar mission.

The nation sent the Omotenashi lunar probe in 2022 as a part of the US Artemis 1 mission, but it was an unsuccessful mission.

After what it called a "hard landing," Japanese startup ispace lost contact with its craft and made an unsuccessful attempt to become the first private company to land on the moon in April.