Moon lander
Following a startling awakening last month, Japan’s space agency announced on Tuesday that it will attempt to resurrect its moon lander after a second chilly, two-week lunar night.
It reactivated for two days as the sun’s angle changed, allowing scientists to use a high-spec camera to take scientific observations of a crater.
However, the probe was shut down in early February because it was not built for the bitterly cold two-week lunar nights, during which the temperature drops to minus 133 degrees.
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Before another planned operation attempt in early March, it was put back to sleep after being awakened for several weeks.
In an announcement on Tuesday, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) expressed its hope that “enough sunlight on the solar cells will start up SLIM around this evening.”
It announced in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that “the project team will begin operations today to restart SLIM after the second lunar night.”
Jaxa said that because SLIM has been exposed to extremely high temperatures, it is unclear if it will react on Tuesday night.
The first private spaceship to land on the moon, the unmanned American lander Odysseus, failed to awaken, according to a statement from its manufacturer on Saturday, even though its solar panels were predicted to receive sufficient sunlight to activate its radio.
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On January 20, SLIM, also known as the “Moon Sniper” due to its precise landing technology, landed inside its designated landing zone.
Japan’s space program achieved a victory following a series of setbacks, becoming the fifth country, after the US, the USSR, China, and India, to accomplish a “soft landing” on the moon.
The mission’s goal is to investigate an allegedly accessible portion of the moon’s mantle, or the typically deep inner layer beneath its crust.
NASA intends to send humans back to the moon in the latter part of this decade.
In the future, the US and its allies hope to build permanent settlements in the area and extract polar ice for both drinking water and rocket fuel for future trips to Mars.
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