by Ten days after making the first moon landing for Japan, the moon lander SLIM has suddenly woken up again after landing upside down.
Mission operators with SLIM, or the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon mission, successfully made the first lunar landing for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on January 19. However, SLIM’s solar panels were in shadow and the small lunar lander fell to fast. silent when its batteries ran out.
JAXA officials said during landing that they hoped the lander would call home again, when the sun reached the lander hit the surface. That trust was repaid.
SLIM called home on Sunday (January 28) and engineers quickly resumed operations, JAXA officials wrote in statement on Xformerly known as Twitter, automatically translated from Japanese by Google.
Related: Photo of Japan’s SLIM lunar lander on the surface of the moon — on its nose (image)
“We immediately began scientific observations with MBC, and succeeded in obtaining first light,” the JAXA statement read, with “first light” referring to the first use of an instrument to take images. MBC, the Multiband Camera, is designed to scour the lunar surface for olivine composition by analyzing the light signatures, or spectra, of reflected sunlight, according to the Planetary Society.
Olivine could be a clue to the formation of the early solar system on a rocky world like ours. The mineral is one of the main components of the Earth’s mantle, and also tends to be concentrated in lunar areas “where the crust is relatively thin,” says a 2010 paper in the journal Nature that includes JAXA’s involvement. One of those zones is the moon’s south pole, where NASA, Japan and a coalition of other nations under the US-led Artemis Agreements plan to send astronauts later in the 2020s.
SLIM’s landing site is the Shioli Crater, a zone filled with ancient impact debris within the Mare Nectaris or Sea of Nectar. The mission’s landing area is about 200 miles (322 kilometers) south of Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility), according to CNN. The Sea of Tranquility is an equatorial landing site where the first lunar astronauts from Apollo 11 touched down in 1969.
SLIM sent back photos of its landing zone on Sunday and JAXA is now “sorting out interesting rocks, assigning each one a nickname, with the intention of gently conveying their relative sizes under the names,” officials said. in the English press. released.
The nicknames in the image seem to invoke size by breed of dog, ranging from a small-sized “toy poodle” to the large and powerful “St. Bernard”.
Even better science may soon be possible: “Preparation is under way to promptly perform high-resolution 10-band spectroscopic observations, as soon as the solar illumination condition improves and SLIM recovers the power generated by the solar array,” the press release added.
Although JAXA has not said how long SLIM will conduct observations in its tilted 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 and dark two-week lunar night, but its design is strong enough that it could emerge from that winter again next month to do more science; that’s according to a statement from Hitoshi Kuninaka, director general of the Japan Institute of Space and Astronomy (ISAS), reported by National Public Radio on January 22.
The report did not specify how SLIM’s design is designed to withstand the deep cold of the moon’s equatorial night temperature of -208 degrees F (-130 degrees Celsius), before it goes into sleep mode again.
SLIM had an engine failure during descent that turned it upside down, but the mission was otherwise successful in reaching its target close, within 328 feet (100 meters), of its target landing position. But SLIM’s unexpected orientation meant it was unable to get power through its solar panels in the hours after landing.
After landing on January 19th during first quarter lighting conditions on the moon, the battery on SLIM dropped two days later to 12% capacity. That critical battery level generated an automatic power down “so that recovery operation could not be restarted due to over-discharge,” SLIM team members mentioned on X.
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Before its first shutdown, SLIM successfully launched two mini rovers it sent to the moon, called EV-1 (“Lunar Expedition Vehicle” 1) and LEV-2. The rovers are performing flawlessly and the ball-like LEV-2 sent home a picture of the slanted SLIM lander. Then SLIM regained his power on Sunday, three days after the full moon.
Japan is the fifth country to land on the moon after the successes of the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India. The next big moon landing may be coming soon: NASA plans to bring a series of science payloads to the surface with IM-1, Intuitive Machines’ first lunar landing attempt. That mission may take off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 14, according to Spaceflight Now’s launch calendar.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program aims to bring robotic sentries to the moon such as IM-1 to support the Artemis program’s astronaut missions. In Astrobotic’s first CLPS mission in December 2023, the Falcon missed the moon and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere weeks later.
