After being stuck without power for more than a week, Japan’s Moon lander has woken up and started snapping images of the lunar surface.
On 28 January, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) re-established contact with the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), which touched down on the slope of a crater near the Moon’s equator on 20 January. “Communication with SLIM was successfully established last night, and operations resumed,” JAXA announced in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
SLIM landed on the surface of the Moon about 55 meters from its initial 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.
But the landing didn’t go smoothly, and one of the probe’s two engines most 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 any of the motors were out of balance. “
In an image captured by a robot that SLIM managed to deploy during its descent — a baseball-sized robot with two cameras — the lander could be seen tipped upside down. Its solar cells were also pointing away from the Sun, which meant that they couldn’t generate enough power to run SLIM’s instruments and communications equipment. The lop-sided lander was forced to run on battery power for almost three hours. When the lander’s battery reached 12%, JAXA shut off SLIM’s power to increase its chances of recharging when the Sun moved into a more favourable position.
The lander’s load is likely due to the redirection of sunlight and its radiation onto the lander’s solar cells, allowing them to start generating electricity, McDowell says. The return of SLIM demonstrates its technological resilience. ” The systems are physically powerful enough that they can be turned off and then awakened once they’ve received some sunlight. “
Shortly after it woke up, SLIM’s multi-band camera — its only scientific instrument — captured an image of a rock-strewn field. The SLIM team named the rocks after dog breeds, including one nearby that they tagged ‘toy poodle’ and a more distant one they called ‘shiba inu’, a famous Japanese breed. The camera will scan the lunar surface for traces of a mineral called olivine, which could help to answer questions about the Moon’s origins.
SLIM’s bumpy landing provides lessons for long-term projects, such as data on how to better design propulsion systems, McDowell says. But landing within a hundred meters of your target site is a feat in itself, he adds. “Even if I had, if I were to come back to life, this project would be a success,” McDowell says.
A JAXA spokesperson said that SLIM will continue to snap images of the lunar surface until daylight on the Moon fades, at the end of January. As well as revealing more clues about the Moon’s chemical composition, the lander’s second wind allows the team to see how long SLIM can survive before lunar night falls, adds McDowell.
For now, the SLIM team will continue to analyze the insights gathered during the spacecraft’s landing. “We believe that the good luck of the exact moon landing will be used in long-term lunar exploration missions,” the JAXA spokesperson said.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00260-z
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