Japanese lander SLIM has restarted after two weeks of forced rest

The Japanese SLIM probe, placed on the moon since late January, has reactivated after surviving a two-week long lunar night, Japan’s space agency JAXA announced Monday. “Last night, a command was sent to SLIM and a response was received, confirming that the craft survived the lunar night and © retained its communication skills! »Jaxa announced excitedly X (formerly Twitter).

Communications were “Stopped after a while, because it was still mid-lunar day and the temperature of the communication equipment was too high”Jaxa said. “Preparations are being made to resume operations when the instrument temperature has cooled sufficiently.”, the space agency added. The SLIM module (Smart Lander for Lunar Investigation) successfully landed on the Moon on January 20, 55 meters from its initial target, i.e. very high precision, making Japan the fifth country after the United States to successfully land on Earth’s natural satellite. States, USSR, China and India.

But due to motor problems in the last ten meters of its descent, SLIM landed at an incline and its photovoltaic cells, which were oriented to the west, did not receive sunlight. SLIM landed in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter called Shioli. Before being shut down, the machine was usually able to land two of its mini-rovers, which were supposed to analyze rocks from the interior of the Moon (lunar mantle), which was still poorly known.

A new rush to the moon

More than 50 years after humans first set foot on its soil — Americans in 1969 — the moon is once again the subject of a global race. The American Artemis program plans to send astronauts back to the Moon, a project recently postponed until September 2026, with the creation of a permanent base at the site in the long term. China has similar competitive plans.

Japan’s first two moon landing attempts failed. In 2022, the JAXA probe, Omotenashi, on the American Artemis 1 mission experienced a fatal battery failure shortly after its exit into space. And last year, the lunar lander of the young private Japanese company Espace crashed on the lunar surface, missing a crucial step in the gentle descent. Last week, the United States returned to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, with a probe from Intuitive Machines, a private American company.

The company announced that its investigation may be falling apart, but that scientific data and images should still be able to be recovered. Getting to the moon is a huge technological challenge even for the major space powers: Another private American company, Astrobotic, under contract to NASA, failed to land its first spacecraft on the moon in early January.