(Tokyo) The Japanese probe SLIM woke up again after surviving the freezing temperatures of its second lunar night, which lasts two Earth weeks, and transmitted new images, the Japanese space agency (Jaxa) announced on Thursday.
“We received a response from SLIM last night and confirmed (that it) had successfully passed its second lunar night, Jaxa declared on the X account dedicated to its module, which had made a historic moon landing for Japan at the end of January.
“As the sun was still high in the sky last night and the equipment was hot, the navigation camera rushed to take the usual landscape photos for a short time,” Jaxa added.
The agency also posted a black and white photo of the rocky surface of a lunar crater taken by its probe.
According to the agency, the data collected also shows that certain temperature sensors and certain battery cells of SLIM are starting to show some failures, but the main functions seem to be holding up.
This is the third revival in total for SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon), which had succeeded in a very high precision moon landing on January 20, making Japan the fifth country to successfully land on the Earth’s natural satellite after the United States, the USSR, the China and India.
However, due to an engine problem in the last tens of meters of its descent, SLIM had sat at an angle, depriving its west-facing photovoltaic cells of sunlight.
After an initial period of inactivity of around ten days and a first awakening, the probe was placed in hibernation and survived its first lunar night, before being put back into sleep at the beginning of March.
SLIM landed in a small crater less than 300 meters 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.
Another probe, Odysseus, sent by the private American company Intuitive Machines, managed to land on the Moon at the end of February, also askew. But it has definitely gone out, the firm announced last Saturday, which initially hoped to reactivate it after the lunar night.
Odysseus was the probe that landed furthest south on the Moon, an area that is of particular interest to the great powers, because there is water there in the form of ice.
NASA ultimately wants to resume manned flights to the Moon, as part of its Artemis program.