Japan’s SLIM moon lander survives another lunar night against all odds

 Japan’s SLIM moon lander survives another lunar night against all odds

Japan's SLIM lander has survived two lunar nights despite landing in a less-than-favourable position.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), is seen in this handout image taken by LEV-2 on the moon, released on January 25, 2024. Photo credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), TAKARA TOMY, Sony Group, Doshisha University /via Reuters

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Thursday confirmed that its SLIM Moon lander survived two lunar nights without its instruments freezing. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon launched in September last year and landed on the Moon on January 19. It was able to do something that ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 could not — not once but twice.

SLIM’s landing made Japan just the fifth country in the world to soft-land a spacecraft on the Moon after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India. But it was not exactly a walk in the park — the 200 kilogram lander actually landed on its nose that day and it went dark shortly after since it was not in a great position for its solar panels to harvest sunlight. But it came back to life again on January 28, and it went on to gather science data.

Shortly after that, JAXA teams put the lander in hibernation mood ahead of its first lunar winter. SLIM had already succeeded with its main mission objectives — demonstrate a soft-landing, collect science data and deploy two small rovers. And it was expected that its instruments would not survive the harsh lunar night when temperatures can be below minus hundred degrees Celsius. But it survived the lunar night not once but twice, according to a JAXA post on X, formerly Twitter.

“According to the acquired data, some temperature sensors and unused battery cells are starting to malfunction, but the majority of functions that survived the first lunar night was maintained even after the second lunar night,” said a post shared by the agency on the platform.