Nearly ten days after its historic moon landing, the Japanese SLIM module was able to resume
"its operations"
, announced Monday the Japanese space agency (Jaxa), which had been forced to interrupt its power supply due to a problem with its solar panels.
“Yesterday (Sunday, Editor’s note) evening, we managed to establish communication with SLIM and resumed operations!”
, welcomed JAXA on the social network X (formerly Twitter).
“We immediately began scientific observations”
with the onboard camera, said Jaxa, which also posted a photograph taken by the module showing the rock called
“Toy Poodle”
, on the lunar surface.
The SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) module successfully landed on the moon on January 20 55 meters from its initial target, a very high degree of precision, making Japan the fifth country to successfully land on the natural satellite of the Moon. Land after USA, USSR, China and India.
But due to a motor problem in the last tens of meters of its descent, SLIM had landed at an angle and its photovoltaic cells facing west did not receive sunlight.
A small crater less than 300 meters
The small lunar craft came back to life
“probably because the energy production of its solar battery resumed while it was exposed to sunlight
,” a Jaxa spokesperson told AFP. .
“We will prioritize what we can do, which is to observe and collect information, rather than adjusting the position of SLIM, which could make the situation worse
,” he added. .
The Moon describes its orbit in 27 Earth days, and daylight lasts about half of this duration, this spokesperson recalled.
Also, daylight where the module is located
“will last approximately until the end of January”
.
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.
One of these two rovers is a spherical probe called SORA-Q, barely larger than a tennis ball, capable of modifying its shape to move on the lunar surface.
It was developed by Jaxa, in partnership with the Japanese toy giant Takara Tomy.
More than 50 years after the first human steps on the Moon - taken by the Americans in 1969 - the Earth's natural satellite has once again become the subject of a global race.
Competition with China
The American Artemis program plans to send astronauts back to the Moon, a project recently postponed to September 2026, with in the longer term the construction of a permanent base on site.
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.
Reaching the Moon remains an immense technological challenge, even for the major space powers: the private American company Astrobotic, under contract with NASA, also failed at the beginning of January to land its first spacecraft on the Moon.