The lander entered lunar orbit on 25 December 2023 and landed on 19 January 2024 at 15:20 UTC, making Japan the fifth country to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon.

[20] SLIM was not the first Japanese lunar lander built for operation on the Moon's surface; on 27 May 2016 NASA announced that the OMOTENASHI (Outstanding Moon exploration Technologies demonstrated by Nano Semi-Hard Impactor) CubeSat lander jointly developed by JAXA and the University of Tokyo was to be launched as a secondary payload on Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis 1.

OMOTENASHI was meant to deploy a mini lunar lander weighing 1 kg; however, on November 21, 2022, JAXA announced that attempts to communicate with the spacecraft had ceased, because the solar cells failed to generate power when facing away from the Sun.

It has its own direct-to-Earth communication equipment, two wide-angle visible light cameras, and electrical components and UHF band antennas courtesy of the MINERVA and OMOTENASHI projects.

[24] Science payloads: Lunar Excursion Vehicle 2 (LEV-2) or Sora-Q, is a tiny rover developed by JAXA in joint cooperation with the toy company Tomy, Sony, and Doshisha University.

LEV-2 extends its shape to crawl on the lunar surface using two wheels at its sides, a method of locomotion inspired by frogs and sea turtles;[26] it can "run" for approximately two hours.

Japan thus became the fifth nation to successfully soft land an operational spacecraft on the Moon, after the Soviet Union, United States, China, and India.

Images autonomously taken by Sora-Q (a capability it shares with its sister rover)[35] showed the SLIM had landed at a 90-degree angle, effectively on its nose, and there had been the loss of an engine nozzle during descent and even possible damage to its Earth-oriented antenna.

[26] After the shutdown on 19 January 2024, the mission's operators still hoped that the lander would wake up in a few days when the Sun would be correctly oriented so sunlight would hit the now askew solar panels.

While the capability to resume activity exists contingent on solar power generation from changes in the direction of the Sun, efforts will be maintained to continue receiving signals from LEV-1.

SLIM was expected to operate only for one lunar daylight period, or 14 Earth days, and the on-board electronics were not designed to withstand the −120 °C (−184 °F) nighttime temperatures on the Moon.

On 25 February 2024, JAXA sent wake-up calls and found SLIM had successfully survived the night on the lunar surface while maintaining communication capabilities.

[47] The Agency stated that they "plan to attempt to resume operation again in mid to late May, when SLIM’s solar cells start generating electricity.