The Japanese probe SLIM ((Smart Lander for Investigating Moon)) survived the freezing temperatures of its second lunar night, which lasts two Earth weeks, and transmitted new images, the Japanese space agency Jaxa announced this Thursday (28).
“We received a response from SLIM yesterday [quarta-feira] at night and we confirm that it has successfully completed its second night on the Moon”, declared Jaxa, on the X social network profile dedicated to the module, which landed on the Moon at the end of January.
“The navigation camera rushed to take the usual landscape photographs for a short period,” added Jaxa, which also released a black and white photograph of the rocky surface of a lunar crater taken by the probe.
The agency said data collected shows that some of SLIM’s temperature sensors and battery cells are beginning to fail, but that core functions appear to be holding up.
This is the third awakening of SLIM, 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 final meters of the descent, SLIM landed at an angle that deprived the photovoltaic cells, facing west, of sunlight.
After an initial period of inactivity of around ten days and a first awakening, the probe was placed into hibernation and survived the first lunar night, before returning to sleep in early March.
SLIM was located in a small crater, less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli. Before being turned off, the spacecraft was able to unload two mini-rovers (lunar exploration vehicles), which were to collect samples for analysis of rocks from the Moon’s internal structure (the lunar mantle), about which very little is still known.
Another probe, Odysseus, sent 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 deactivation of the equipment
Odysseus was the probe that landed furthest south on the Moon, an area of special interest to major powers because it contains water in the form of ice.
NASA, the North American space agency, hopes to resume manned flights to the Moon as part of the Artemis program.
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