The Japanese probe SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon), placed on the Moon since the end of January, is activated again after surviving two weeks of rigorous lunar night, the Japanese space agency (JAXA) announced on Monday February 26. “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 capability! » said JAXA enthusiastically on X.
Communications were “interrupted shortly after, as it was still mid-lunar day and the temperature of the communications equipment was very high,” JAXA said.
“Preparations are being made to resume operations when instrument temperatures have cooled sufficiently,” the space agency added.
On January 20, the SLIM module successfully landed on the moon 55 meters from its initial target, a very high degree of precision, making Japan the fifth country to successfully land on the Earth's natural satellite after the United States. , the USSR, China and India.
But due to a motor problem in the last tens of meters of its descent, SLIM landed at an angle and its photovoltaic cells facing west did not receive sunlight.
SLIM landed in a small crater less than 1,000 feet in diameter, called Shioli. Before being turned off, the machine was able to land its two mini-rovers normally, supposed to carry out analyzes of rocks coming from the internal structure of the Moon (the lunar mantle), which is still very poorly understood.
New rush to the Moon
More than fifty years after its soil was first set foot by humans – the 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 in the longer term the construction of a permanent base there. China has similar competing plans.
Japan's first two moon landing attempts went wrong. In 2022, a JAXA probe, Omotenashi, on board the American Artemis 1 mission, experienced a fatal battery failure shortly after its ejection into space. And last year, a lander from the young private Japanese company ispace crashed on the surface of the Moon, having missed the crucial step of gentle descent.
Last week, the United States returned to the Moon for the first time in more than fifty years, with the probe of a private American company, Intuitive Machines. The company announced that its probe was probably lying on one side, but that scientific data and images should still be able to be recovered.
Reaching the Moon remains an immense technological challenge, even for the major space powers: another private American company, Astrobotic, also under contract with NASA, failed in early January to land its first craft on the Moon.
