Japan's 'Moon Sniper' lands but power running low

Japan on Saturday became only the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, but its "Moon Sniper" spacecraft was running out of power due to a solar battery problem.

After a nail-biting 20-minute descent, space agency JAXA said its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had touched down and communication had been established.

But without the solar cells functioning, JAXA official Hitoshi Kuninaka said the craft — dubbed the "Moon Sniper" for its precision technology — would only have power for "several hours".

As mission control prioritised acquiring data while they could, Kuninaka suggested that once the angle of the sun changed, the batteries might work again.

"It is unlikely that the solar battery has failed. It's possible that it is not facing in the originally planned direction," he told a news conference.

"If the descent was not successful, it would have crashed at a very high speed. If that were the case, all functionality of the probe would be lost," he said.

"But data is being sent to Earth."

SLIM is one of several new lunar missions that have been launched by countries and private firms, 50 years after the first human Moon landing.

Crash landings, communication failures and other technical problems are rife, and only four other nations have made it to the Moon: the United States, the Soviet Union, China and most recently India.

NASA chief Bill Nelson tweeted his "congratulations (to Japan) on being the historic fifth country to land successfully on the Moon".

"We value our partnership in the cosmos and continued collaboration," he added.

 'Big success' 

JAXA hopes to analyse data acquired during the landing, which will help determine whether the...