Japan’s lunar lander has surprised its team by successfully emerging from a bitterly cold lunar night that few thought it would survive.
Japan’s lunar lander has reestablished contact with its mission controllers on Earth, confirming that it had successfully made it through a bitterly cold two-week lunar night.
SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) reached the moon last month — a first for Japan as it became only the fifth nation to achieve a soft-landing on the lunar surface. But it soon emerged that SLIM had toppled over as it touched down, leaving the team at JAXA — Japan’s NASA — wondering if the mission could continue.
Following a short outage soon after landing, JAXA was able to make brief contact with SLIM, during which the lander beamed a number of images back to Earth. But as the sun’s rays moved away from the lander’s solar panels, it again lost power as it entered a lengthy lunar night.
