TOKYO—Japan’s space agency said Thursday that its first lunar mission hit the tiny patch of the moon’s surface it was aiming for, in a successful demonstration of its system—although the probe appears to be lying upside-down.
Japan became the fifth country in history to reach the moon when the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, touched down on the Moon early on Saturday. But trouble with the probe’s solar batteries made it hard at first to figure out whether the probe landed in the target zone.
