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Ten days after making the first moon landing in Japan, the SLIM lunar lander suddenly woke up again after arriving upside down.
Mission operators with SLIM, or Lunar Mission Investigation Intelligent Lander, successfully made the first lunar landing for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on January 19. However, SLIM's solar panels were in the shade and the small lander quickly fell to the lunar surface. Silent when its batteries run out.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency officials said during the landing that they hope the lander will return home again, once the sun reaches the stricken lander on the surface. This trust has been repaid.
Slim called home on Sunday (Jan. 28) and engineers quickly resumed operations, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency officials wrote in a letter. Statement on Xformerly Twitter, was automatically translated from Japanese by Google.
Related: The Japanese SLIM lunar lander is photographed on the surface of the Moon – on its nose (photo)
“We immediately began scientific observations with MBC, and successfully obtained first light,” the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said in a statement, where “first light” refers to the first use of an instrument to capture images. The MBC multi-band camera is designed to scan the lunar surface for olivine composition by analyzing optical signatures, or spectra of reflected sunlight, According to the Planetary Society.
Olivine could be evidence of the early formation of the solar system on rocky worlds like our own. The mineral is one of the main parts of the Earth's mantle, and also tends to be concentrated in lunar locations “where the crust is relatively thin,” according to a 2010 paper published in the journal Nature that included input from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. One such region is the lunar south pole, where NASA, Japan and a coalition of other countries under the US-led Artemis Accords plan to send astronauts later in the 2020s.
SLIM's landing site is Shioli Crater, an area filled with ancient rubble within Mare Nectaris, or Sea of Nectar. The mission's landing zone is located about 200 miles (322 km) south of Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). According to CNN. The Sea of Tranquility is an almost tropical landing site where the first astronauts landed on the moon from Apollo 11 in 1969.
SLIM sent photos of its landing area on Sunday, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is now “sorting out the interesting rocks, and assigning each a nickname, with the aim of seamlessly communicating their relative sizes through names,” the officials added in an English-language message. press release.
The nicknames in the photo seem to evoke size depending on the dog's breed, from the small “Toy Poodle” to the large and powerful “Saint Bernard.”
Better science may be possible soon, the press release added: “High-resolution 10-band spectroscopic observations are being prepared immediately, once the solar illumination condition improves and the SLIM is restored by the energy generated by the solar array.”
While the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has not said how long SLIM will continue to conduct observations in its deflected state, the mission is designed to operate for one lunar day (two weeks) as long as sunlight is available.
SLIM isn't designed to survive the cold, dark lunar night for two weeks, but its design is robust enough that it may wake up again from this hibernation next month to do more science; This is according to statements by Hitoshi Kuninaka, Director General of the Japan Institute of Astronautics and Astronautics (ISAS), As reported by National Public Radio On January 22nd.
The report did not specify ways in which the SLIM design is intended to adapt to the deep night cold of the equatorial Moon's temperature of -208 degrees Fahrenheit (-130 degrees Celsius), before emerging again from sleep mode.
SLIM experienced an engine failure during landing that left it upside down, but otherwise the mission achieved its goal of getting very close, to within 328 feet (100 m), of the target landing site. But SLIM's unexpected orientation left it unable to receive power via its solar panels in the hours after landing.
After landing on January 19 during first-quarter illumination conditions on the Moon, the SLIM's battery capacity dropped two days later to 12%. This critical battery level caused the power to automatically turn off “to avoid inability to restart the recovery process due to over-discharge,” SLIM team members said. mentioned in x.
Before its first shutdown, SLIM had successfully sent two small rovers to the Moon, called EV-1 (“Lunar Excursion Vehicle” 1) and LEV-2. The rovers worked flawlessly and the ball-like LEV-2 sent home an image of the SLIM lander. SLIM then regained strength on Sunday, three days after the full moon.
Japan is the fifth country to land smoothly on the surface of the moon after the success of the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India. Another big moon landing is likely coming soon: NASA plans to bring a batch of scientific payloads to the surface with IM-1, the first lunar landing attempt from Intuitive Machines. This mission may be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 14, according to the American “space” website Spaceflight launch calendar now.
NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program aims to bring robotic guards to the Moon like IM-1 to support astronaut missions in the Artemis program. Astrobotic's first CLPS mission in December 2023 saw the Peregrine lander miss the Moon and re-enter Earth's atmosphere weeks later.
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