Japan on Saturday became the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, but said 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 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.”

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

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

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

“It’s possible that it is not facing in the originally planned direction,” he told an early-hours 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.”

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called the landing “very welcome news” but said he was aware that more “detailed analysis” on the solar cells was needed.

United States space agency NASA’s chief, Bill Nelson, tweeted his “congratulations (to Japan) on being the historic fifth country to land successfully on the Moon.”

WITH AFP