Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) moon lander has returned its first photographs of the lunar surface after putting itself into orbit around the moon on Christmas Day.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) posted the black-and-white, incredibly detailed photos of the moon’s surface marked with craters on its X feed, which was once Twitter.

The photos were taken on Monday, December 25, following the spacecraft’s successful entry into lunar orbit at 2:51 a.m. EST (0951 GMT or 4:51 p.m. Japan time).
“SLIM entered lunar orbit and successfully finished the main engine injection at 16:51! An image from SLIM near the moon is shown below,” JAXA officials wrote.

On September 6, SLIM and JAXA’s X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) were launched. SLIM departed Earth for an elliptical orbit, revolving around the moon approximately every 6.4 hours, while XRISM continued to orbit around Earth, carrying out its mission to study cosmic X-ray sources.

In this orbit, the spacecraft swings out as far as 2,485 miles (4,000 km) from the moon, bringing the lander as near to the surface as possible—roughly 373 miles (600 km).

On January 24, the 8.8-foot-long (2.7-meter) spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon. Japan will become the fifth nation to successfully land on the moon, following the Soviet Union, the United States, China, and India, if SLIM’s attempt is successful.
According to JAXA, after landing safely on the moon, SLIM will validate the technology required for landings on the moon and solar system planets. It will also carry out up-close and personal studies of the lunar surface using a small-scale probe.

“By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land, as had been the case before,” the space agency wrote in a mission description. “By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the moon.”