After a nine-day shutdown, the inverted lunar lander gained enough to restart.
By Gemma Conroy & Nature magazine
The lander was photographed upside down on the lunar surface.
Sociedad JAXA/TOMY/Sony Group Corporation/Doshisha
After being stranded for more than a week, Japan’s lunar lander woke up and began taking pictures of the lunar surface.
On January 28, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) re-established contact with the Moon Research Smart Lander (SLIM), which landed on the side of a crater near the lunar equator on January 20. “Communication with SLIM was effectively established last night and operations have resumed,” JAXA announced in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
SLIM landed on the surface of the Moon approximately 55 meters from its original target, making it the most accurate landing ever made. A few days later, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter landed on the Moon at an altitude of 80 kilometers.
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But the landing didn’t go smoothly, as one of the probe’s two engines likely wasted thrust just 50 meters above the surface, says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. the rails because either motor was unbalanced.
In a symbol captured via a robot that SLIM controlled to deploy its descent (a baseball-sized robot with two cameras), the overturned lander can be seen. Its solar cells were also oriented toward the Sun, which meant they could simply not generate enough force to run SLIM’s communications tools and equipment. The unbalanced lander had to run on battery power for about 3 hours. When the lander’s battery reached 12 percent, JAXA reduced the force to SLIM to increase its chances of recharging as the Sun headed toward a more favorable position.
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