Japan sent its first mission to the moon, a lander called SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) this January, and has continued to have problems with it. It touched down on January 19, 2024, bounced, and landed on its nose. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shut it down on January 20 to conserve energy, as its solar panels were facing in the wrong direction causing the craft to be unable to generate power. Mission controllers hoped that the sun’s angle would change, allowing them to reboot the lander. On January 29, they were able to do just that, rebooting the lander.
Since then, the spacecraft has investigated rocks around the Shioli crater, south of the moon’s equator. It uses a multi-band spectral camera to do so. The research generated by this could tell scientists about the moon’s formation. The leading theory is that a large object collided with Earth that broke off a large amount of debris that eventually formed the moon. If this is true, there will be similar rock in the moon’s mantle as there is on Earth, and ejected lunar mantle material might be found around the Shioli crater.
Yet, there is one final hurdle to overcome. It was very late in the lunar day when SLIM came back online, since its panel was facing west. It only had a short amount of time to function before the lunar night came. The lunar night is fourteen days long and will have temperatures as low as -200 – -300 ℉. The lander doesn’t have a warming system and the cold temperatures could severely damage its battery and electronics. SLIM took one more picture on February 1 before JAXA put it to sleep again, which is at the top of the article.
JAXA regards the mission as a success, as they have been able to retrieve more data then they originally hoped for, and their landing was still under pinpoint accuracy standards, being only at a maximum of 10 meters of its mark. They are also still planning on attempting to contact and restart their lander once the lunar night passes.
Cites
https://newatlas.com/space/japans-moon-lander-maybe-final-sleep/
https://mashable.com/article/japan-moon-landing-final-image
