Japan’s moon lander woke up after unexpectedly surviving a second frigid, two-week lunar night and transmitted new images back to Earth, the country’s space agency said yesterday.
The uncrewed Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) probe touched down in January, making Japan only the fifth nation to reach the lunar surface without crashing.
However, the lightweight spacecraft landed at a wonky angle that left its solar panels facing the wrong way.
Photo: AFP / JAXA / Takara Tomy / Sony Group Corp / Doshisha University
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced the probe’s latest surprise awakening in a post on X.
“We received a response from SLIM last night and confirmed that SLIM had successfully completed its second overnight,” it said.
A black-and-white photograph of the rocky surface of a crater accompanied the post on SLIM’s official account.
“Since the sun was still high in the sky ... and the equipment was still hot, we recorded images of the usual scenery with the navigational camera, among other activities, for a short period of time,” it said.
Yesterday’s news came after an uncrewed US lander called Odysseus — the first private spaceship to successfully land on the moon — had failed to wake up.
Its manufacturer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, had hoped the lander might revive like Japan’s SLIM, but on Saturday said that its lander’s mission was over.
The Intuitive Machines spaceship also landed at the wrong angle, but completed several tests and send back photos before the most recent lunar night began.
JAXA has dubbed SLIM the “Moon Sniper” for its precision landing technology.
The aim of its mission was to examine a part of the moon’s mantle — the usually deep inner layer beneath its crust — believed to be accessible at the crater where it landed.
About three hours after its nail-biting touchdown on Jan. 20, JAXA switched the lander off remotely to save power, having received technical and image data from its descent.
As the sun’s angle shifted, the probe came back to life in late January for two days and carried out scientific observations of a crater with a high-spec camera.
JAXA said that the spacecraft was “not designed for the harsh lunar nights,” when the temperature plunges below minus-130°C.
So scientists had cause for celebration when SLIM successfully woke up late last month against the odds.
The SLIM saga has been a boon for the space agency after a string of high-profile failures, including two previous Japanese lunar missions — one public and one private.
Seven people sustained mostly minor injuries in an airplane fire in South Korea, authorities said yesterday, with local media suggesting the blaze might have been caused by a portable battery stored in the overhead bin. The Air Busan plane, an Airbus A321, was set to fly to Hong Kong from Gimhae International Airport in southeastern Busan, but caught fire in the rear section on Tuesday night, the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. A total of 169 passengers and seven flight attendants and staff were evacuated down inflatable slides, it said. Authorities initially reported three injuries, but revised the number
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
RSS