Japanese SLIM probe survives second lunar night (which lasts two Earth weeks) – Science

The Japanese probe SLIM survived the frigid temperatures of its second lunar night, which lasted two Earth weeks, and transmitted new imagesthe Japanese space agency Jaxa announced this Thursday.

“We received a response from SLIM yesterday [quarta-feira] at night and we confirmed having successfully completed its second night on the Moon“, declared Jaxa, on the profile on the social network X (Twitter) dedicated to the module, which landed on the Moon at the end of January.

“The navigation chamber hurried to take the usual landscape photographs for a short period“, added Jaxa, which also published a black and white photograph of the rocky surface of a lunar crater taken by the probe.

The probe had already shared its first photographs when it reached the Moon’s orbit. Click on the images for more details.

The agency indicated that the data collected also shows that Some of the SLIM’s temperature sensors and battery cells are starting to fail, but the main functions appear to be holding up.

This is the SLIM’s third awakening (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon), which successfully completed a precision lunar landing on January 20, making Japan the fifth country to land on Earth’s natural satellite, after the United States, the former Soviet Union, China and India.

However, due to an engine problem in the last few tens of meters of the descent, the SLIM landed at an angle that deprived the west-facing photovoltaic cells of sunlight.

See or remember some of the images shared at the launch

After an initial period of inactivity of about ten days and a first awakening, the probe was put into hibernation and survived the first lunar night, before going back to sleep in early March.

SLIM landed in a small crater, less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli. Before being turned off, the spacecraft was able to unload two mini-roverswho were to carry out rock analyzes of the Moon’s internal structure (the lunar mantle), about which very little is still known.

Another probe, to Odysseussent by the private North American company Intuitive Machines, also managed to land on the Moon at the end of February. However, the company, which initially hoped to reactivate it after the lunar night, announced on Saturday the definitive “shutdown” of the probe.

To Odysseus was the probe that landed furthest south on the Moonan area of ​​particular interest to the great powers because contains water in the form of ice.