Ten days after making Japan’s first moon landing, the SLIM lunar lander suddenly wakes up again after arriving upside down.
Mission operators with SLIM, or the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon mission, successfully completed the first moon landing for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on January 19. However, SLIM’s solar panels were in the shade and the small lunar lander fell quickly. silent when the batteries were empty.
JAXA officials said during the landing that they hoped the lander would call home again once the sun reached the stricken lander on the surface. That trust was repaid.
SLIM called home on Sunday (Jan. 28) and engineers quickly resumed work, JAXA officials wrote in a statement about Xformerly Twitter, automatically translated from Japanese by Google.
Related: Japan’s SLIM lunar lander photographed on the lunar surface – on its nose (image)
“We immediately began scientific observations with MBC and successfully obtained first light,” the JAXA statement said, with “first light” referring to the first use of an instrument to capture images. MBC, the Multi-Band Camera, is designed to scan the moon’s surface for the composition of olivine by analyzing the light signatures, or spectra, of reflected sunlight, according to the Planetary Society.
Olivine could be a clue to the early formation of rocky worlds like ours in the solar system. The mineral is one of the most important parts of the Earth’s mantle and is also often concentrated in lunar locations “where the crust is relatively thin,” according to a 2010 article in the journal Nature in which JAXA also participates. One of those zones is the moon’s 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 the Shioli Crater, a zone filled with ancient impact debris in the Mare Nectaris, or Sea of Nectar. The mission’s landing area is about 200 miles (322 kilometers) south of Mare Tranquillitatis (the Sea of Tranquility), according to CNN. The Sea of Tranquility is an approximately equatorial landing site where the first lunar astronauts of Apollo 11 landed in 1969.
SLIM sent back photos of its landing zone on Sunday and JAXA is now “sorting out important stones, assigning a nickname to each of them, with the intention of communicating their relative sizes smoothly through the names,” officials added in an English-language press. Edition.
The nicknames in the image appear to refer to size per dog breed, ranging from the small ‘toy poodle’ to the large and powerful ‘St. Bernard’.
Even better science could soon be possible: “Preparations are underway to immediately conduct high-resolution 10-band spectroscopic observations as soon as solar illumination conditions improve and SLIM recovers from the power generated by the solar panels,” added the press release added.
Although JAXA has not said how long SLIM will conduct oblique observations, the mission is designed for a single Monday (two weeks), as long as the Sun is available.
SLIM is not designed to survive the two-week cold and dark moon night, but the design is robust enough that it can wake up from that hibernation next month to do even more science; This is evident from comments by Hitoshi Kuninaka, director general of the Japan Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS), reported by National Public Radio on January 22.
The report did not specify in what ways SLIM’s design is intended to survive the deep nighttime chill of the moon’s equatorial temperature of -130 degrees Celsius before emerging from sleep mode.
SLIM suffered an engine failure during the descent that left the aircraft upside down, but otherwise the mission fulfilled its objective of getting very close, within 100 meters, to the intended landing site. But due to SLIM’s unexpected orientation, the aircraft was unable to receive power through its solar panels in the hours after landing.
After landing on January 19 during the first quarter of lunar illumination, SLIM’s battery dropped to 12% capacity two days later. That critical battery level generated an automatic shutdown “to avoid the inability to restart for a recovery operation due to excessive discharge,” SLIM team members mentioned on X.
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Before the first shutdown, SLIM successfully sent two mini-rovers that it took to the moon, named EV-1 (“Lunar Excursion Vehicle” 1) and LEV-2. The rovers work flawlessly and the ball-like LEV-2 sent home a photo of the crooked SLIM lander. SLIM then regained its strength on Sunday, three days after the full moon.
Japan is the fifth country to make a soft landing on the moon, following success by the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India. Another big moon may be coming soon: NASA plans to bring a series of scientific payloads to the surface with IM-1, Intuitive Machines’ first moon landing. According to Spaceflight Now’s launch calendar, that mission could launch on February 14 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program aims to deliver robotic sentinels like IM-1 to the moon in support of the Artemis program’s astronaut missions. On Astrobotic’s first CLPS mission in December 2023, the Peregrine lander missed the moon and reentered Earth’s atmosphere weeks later.