Japan's Moon lander survives another lunar night, waking up to take photos

3 May

A photo of a moon lander lying on its side after encountering problems in landing — Image caption,
Whoops - this moon lander overcame a tricky landing to snap some new shots

A sleepy Moon lander has impressed scientists by waking up after a long night to take brand new pictures of the lunar surface.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) was launched by the Japanese space agency Jaxa last year, but things got off to a rocky start when it touched down on the Moon in January.

After landing sideways, meaning it couldn't use its solar panels correctly, Slim powered down and wasn't expected to survive the harsh lunar nights.

But it seems like Slim is full of surprises, with this being the third time that it's woken up to send images back to Earth.

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A very bright black and white image of the lunar surface, taken by Slim

X/@SLIM_JAXA

According to Jaxa, Slim's brand new image of the Moon is so bright "because this was captured during the earliest Moon phase yet, [where] the Moon is bright and shadows are short"

The team at Jaxa were amazed by the Moon lander, saying on X (formerly Twitter) that "Slim has maintained main functionality even after 3 nights on the Moon, which was not anticipated in the design!"

A lunar night is when the surface of the Moon is not exposed to the sun, and lasts 14 Earth days at a time.

As well as being much longer than a night on Earth, a lunar night is much colder, with temperatures dropping as low as minus 130C!

An artist's impression of the Slim moon lander in space

Jaxa

Only half of all the attempts to land on the Moon have ever succeeded, and this mission is Jaxa's first ever soft moon landing (where astronauts aim to land a vehicle without damaging it) with an unmanned spacecraft

Jaxa are going to keep monitoring Slim to learn more about how it survived these conditions three times in a row, as well as trying to predict any faults that could cause the lander to stop working all-together.

Slim has now returned to sleep away the long lunar nights. On X, Jaxa said: "We plan to attempt to resume operation again in mid to late May, when SLIM's solar cells start generating electricity."

Slim's mission is to send out small probes to investigate the Moon and the inner layer of its surface, which Jaxa believe they can access at the crater where it landed.