After the sun hits the solar panels, the Japanese moon landers gets back to work
The JAXA lunar probe probed with a robot rover and an olivine rock sample given the name “Toy Poodle”
The JAXA said Monday that it successfully established communication with the probe on Sunday night and began taking pictures of the Moon’s surface and sending them to the Earth.
In an image captured by a robot that SLIM managed to deploy during the probe’s descent — a baseball-sized rover with two cameras — the lander could be seen tipped upside-down. It couldn’t generate enough power to run its equipment because of the Solar cells pointing away from the Sun. The lop-sided lander was forced to run on battery power for almost three hours and when the lander’s battery reached 12%, JAXA shut off power to increase the chances of it recharging when the Sun moved into a more favourable position.
With power, SLIM has continued work to analyze the composition of olivine rocks on the lunar surface with its multi-band spectral camera, seeking clues about the Moon’s origin and evolution, the agency said. Earlier observations suggest that the moon may have formed when the Earth hit another planet.
A black-and-white photo posted by JAXA on social media showed the rocky lunar surface, including a rock the agency said it had named “Toy Poodle” after seeing it in initial images. The probe is analyzing six rocks, all of which have been given the names of dog breeds.
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The sun is expected to be enough to continue operations for several days. JAXA said it’s not clear if the craft will work again after another severely cold lunar night.
The most precise landing of all time took place on the Moon, where SLIM landed 55 metres away from its original target. Days later, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spotted the lander on the Moon from 80 kilometres above.
Japan’s first lunar mission hit its target in a precision touchdown on Jan. 20, but landed the wrong way up, leaving its solar panels unable to see the sun.
The data gathered from the landing will be analysed by SLIM. “We believe that the success of the pinpoint moon landing will be utilized in future lunar exploration missions,” says JAXA’s spokesperson.
SLIM’s bumpy landing offers lessons for future missions, such as insights on how to design better propulsion systems, says McDowell. But landing within 100 metres of its target site is an accomplishment all on its own, he adds. “Even if it hadn’t come back to life I would have rated this as a super successful mission,” says McDowell.
But the landing wasn’t entirely smooth sailing, with one of the probe’s two engines losing thrust when it was just 50 metres above the surface. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge says. “It started going sideways because the two engines were unbalanced.”
