Landing on the Moon

Despite developing a critical issue with its solar cell, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) 'Smart Lander for Investigating Moon' successfully completed a soft landing on the Moon on Saturday (JST). As this infographic shows, that adds Japan to what is now a list of just five countries that have managed to implement a soft lunar landing. The energy supply problem led JAXA to disconnect the lander's battery, saying in a statement: "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".

This feat comes hot on the heels of the Chandrayaan-3 which touched down on the Moon last August, making India the fourth country to have successfully landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface. Chandrayaan-3 was also the first lander to arrive intact on the south pole of the Moon. This now marked the second Moon-based success for India's space agency the ISRO. After orbiting the Moon for 312 days, Chandrayaan-1 deployed a Moon impact probe in November 2008, releasing underground debris that, after analysis by the orbiter, confirmed the presence of water.

On September 14, 1959, The Soviet Union's Luna 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to make contact with the Moon - slamming into its surface and completing its lunar impactor mission. After that momentous achievement, the USSR shifted its focus away from impactors, and eventually became the first country, in 1966, to successfully complete a soft landing on the Moon. A few months later, NASA's Surveyor 1 became the first U.S. spacecraft to conduct a soft lunar landing - a mission which paved the way for the manned Apollo missions and eventually Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin becoming the first humans to set foot on the celestial body's surface.

Despite the USSR's early space race dominance, the United States is still to this day the only country to have successfully landed humans on the Moon - having done so another five times after the famous Apollo 11 mission. Having fallen down the priority list of most space agencies since the heights of the sixties, landing on the Moon has come back into focus in recent years. China became the first country to soft land a spacecraft on the 'dark' or 'far' side of the Moon, when the Chang'e 4 lander touched down and deployed the Yutu-2 lunar rover in December 2018.