This is CBS. I am the world. I'm John Bachelor from the surface of the planet Earth. We're headed to the moon. Thanks to Slim. Bob Zimmerman is here.

He keeps the website behind the black reporting on excessive success in reaching orbit, the moon and beyond.

And right now the Japanese are on center stage. Bob, what is Slim? Good evening to you.

Good evening to you. Slim is a Japanese lunar land. It's the Japanese first attempt to land a unmanned craft softly on the moon.

It launched a few weeks ago. It's been an Earth orbit slowly raising the Earth orbit. Well, this past weekend it fired its engines to do what the Apollo missions named the Translune Injection.

This is the engine burn that takes it out of Earth orbit or at least heads it for the moon. And Slim is an engineering mission. It's not a science mission.

It's once again any time they're going to try to land first time on the moon. They're really trying to figure out if they can do it.

As such as India's Temps and the private company in Japan. Ice space temps to do it. Now Japan's Space Agency Jacks is attempting to do it.

And so it's an engineering test. The one of the engineers they're doing is actually trying a somewhat unprecedented way to get to the moon.

For example, India's Chantry on three spacecraft. It just kept raising its orbit, raising its orbit until it entered the lunar sphere of influence and then it shifted to a lunar orbit.

And that was also used by Kuto R and bearish sheet one by the Israeli non-profit. Slim is not doing that. Slim is doing something I've seen and I've seen before.

They raised their orbit so they're now going to fly past the moon. Just like the Apollo missions did. But they're not going to fly by when they enter the lunar orbit. They don't have an engine. I think slow enough to slow them into the lunar orbit.

So instead they're going to fly past the moon and use the moon's gravity to adjust their Earth orbit to bring them around a wide sweeping orbit.

They're not going to map them behind the blocks. You can see there's a wide sweeping orbit that will then bring them back to the moon at the right time, at the right speed, in the right direction so they can do their landing.

And that's the other half of their main engineering goal. This mission's purpose is to see if an autonomous unmanned spacecraft can land precisely with a very small target zone about 300 feet across.

Most target zones for unmanned craft are much, much larger by 10 times larger. If you can tighten that target zone to very small spaces, you can then land an unmanned craft in much rougher terrain, go places where you couldn't go before.

And so that's what this is testing. And so that's their plan. It'll be several more months before they get to land on the moon, but they that trans lunar direction worked and are on their way, John.

It occurs to me, Bob, that they're using less fuel. So they have a better lift off and they can use a smaller rocket or put more instruments on board. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's correct. The reason that they do these kind of very complicated orbital maneuvers to get to the moon, much taking much longer than, you know, a direct flight, which takes only a few days, is to save on fuel and therefore save on weight and provide capabilities to do other things instead. That's exactly right.

So now we're starting the moon, you too, too, reporting. How's it doing, Bob? Healthy?

We do not know how you two two is doing, but the Chinese had not posted any updates on you to do a small rover on the far side of the moon since January of this year.

And then they suddenly did do a release in late September, in which they posted a map showing the full present known route of you two on the surface. I've got that posted on behind the blacks.

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