Japan’s successful touchdown on the lunar surface not only made it the fifth country to soft land a spacecraft on the moon but may have also demonstrated critical technologies for future space missions.

Dubbed “Moon Sniper,” the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft tested a new system that allows moon missions to land within 100 meters of a target area, a capability that — if confirmed over the coming weeks — would mark a major breakthrough in efforts to build an international lunar base camp and greatly advance other space exploration projects.

Designed to land “where we want to, rather than where it is easy to land,” this pinpoint-landing technology “may be applied for a precision buildup of the Artemis base camp,” said Peter Garretson, a space strategy consultant and senior fellow in Defense Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council.

Artemis is a U.S.-led multinational program that aims to return astronauts to the moon as early as 2026 and establish a sustainable presence there to prepare missions to Mars and facilitate deep-space exploration.

But there is more.

With a budget of $100 million, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission also showed that it is possible to carry out such missions in a fuel-efficient and cost-effective way — an achievement that could set a new standard for future moonshots.

Following a four-month journey, the spacecraft touched down after midnight Saturday, with JAXA officials saying they have good reason to believe it achieved its goal of a high-precision landing at a crater slope, although this may take up to a month to verify.

Issues with the lander’s solar panel, however, have threatened to cut short other aspects of the mission, including the study of minerals and other elements on the moon’s surface, although JAXA officials said Monday they were cautiously optimistic that they could eventually bring the lander back to life.

“According to the telemetry data, SLIM's solar cells are facing west,” JAXA said in a statement. “So we believe there is a possibility of power generation if sunlight hits the moon from the west in the future, and we’re now preparing for restoration.”

The exact cause of the malfunction is still unclear, but Hitoshi Kuninaka, director-general of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, suggested that this could be due to the lander touching down at an angle where the solar panel is currently facing away from the sun.

Should this be the case, the setback may prove to be merely temporary.

“There is hope that as the moon orbits around the Earth, and the angle of the sun changes, that sunlight might fall upon the solar panels at some later date,” said Garretson, noting that if the panel got enough sunlight, it may begin to recharge the batteries and revive the spacecraft.

In another positive development, JAXA also said Monday that the lander “was able to complete the transmission of technical and image data acquired during descent and on the lunar surface,” confirming that “a lot of data” had been transmitted.

Getting the solar power cells to work is critical, as it would otherwise be impossible to transmit data back to Earth, a JAXA spokesperson told The Japan Times.

Seiji Sugita, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo, explained that because the solar panel is placed almost horizontally on the craft, even a small tilt after touchdown would prevent it from receiving sufficient sunlight, especially at this moment in time when the sun is shining at a low elevation.

Experts have also raised the possibility that the two-step landing might have not worked as intended, with Sugita emphasizing that the coming days and weeks will be “critical to understanding exactly what happened.”

This will also be important to determine any adjustments JAXA and others would need to make when planning future lunar missions.

Regardless of the power issue, experts agree that Japan’s moon landing marks a remarkable achievement that puts the country among the world’s top space-faring nations, and hope that this will help revitalize a space program that has suffered a series of setbacks in recent months.

These include a failed moon-landing attempt last April by Tokyo-based Ispace, the explosion of an Epsilon S small rocket engine during a July test and JAXA’s decision in March to destroy its flagship medium-lift H3 rocket due to engine ignition trouble.

“Before SLIM, Japan was lagging behind other nations in lunar exploration, but this mission has demonstrated that the country has a key technology that other nations interested in lunar resource utilization will need to obtain,” said Garretson, adding that pinpoint landing will now become “an unavoidable technology.”

JAXA’s system will be particularly crucial for the Artemis missions.

Japan is a founding member of the Artemis Accords, and has now become only the second signatory to land on the moon this century besides India, which joined the project last year.

“That by itself is critical, given NASA’s Artemis-related missions are delayed,” said Namrata Goswami, a space policy expert and professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University.

JAXA has also been praised for the navigational skills employed in its latest mission, particularly given the long, circuitous route taken by the probe.

“Taking such a long route and braking with the use of the Earth-moon-sun system gravity implies that braking occurred naturally to slow the spacecraft down, instead of using costly fuel,” Namrata said.

This means that SLIM’s route to the moon was “cost-effective” and can be utilized in Artemis and other programs, Namrata added. These could include the multinational Lunar Gateway project, which is aimed at developing a research outpost orbiting the moon to prepare for Mars missions.

SLIM is only the latest of Japan’s planned missions to further lunar exploration. The country will be joining forces with India for the Lunar Polar Exploration mission set for launch sometime after 2025.

LUPEX’s goal is to obtain data on the quantity, distribution and forms of water present on the moon to determine if it can be utilized for sustainable space exploration activities.

“The cooperation could see New Delhi benefit from Japan’s pinpoint-landing technology, while Tokyo could take advantage of India’s ability to sustain its mission on the moon as well as its solar cell designs,” said Namrata.

Perhaps more visibly, an agreement signed last November with the United States is also expected to see a Japanese astronaut aboard a planned Lunar Gateway outpost and another joining a mission to the lunar surface, making Japan only the second country to put boots on the moon after the U.S.

While scientifically and technically remarkable, the latest developments also come at a time of rising geopolitical tensions where rival blocs race to become the first to access the potential wealth of the moon and gain the upper hand in what they view as an increasingly crucial domain.

“The fact that the failed Russian attempt, the Indian landing and Japanese landing have all taken place within just months demonstrates an increasing tempo of lunar missions as nations build incremental capabilities to set up a moon base and eventually extract resources,” said Garretson.

In this quest for supremacy, the successful exploitation of lunar resources is expected to provide the winners of this race with long-term economic and strategic advantages.