Ten days ago, the Japanese space agency’s SLIM lander managed to make a soft landing, but for some reason it did so with its main part down. As a result, the solar cells were not facing the Sun, so they did not receive enough energy to operate and the device could not communicate. But when the position of the light changed, something unexpected happened: the apparatus came to life.

On January 19, 2024, Japan became the fifth country to make a soft landing on the Moon with a probe. However, since the module landed on its nose, the solar cells were not oriented at the right angle to the Sun. Therefore, the device quickly went silent after a small amount of battery energy data was transmitted.

This is often a fatal problem: Once the battery is discharged, the spacecraft may not be able to operate further, even if its photocells are exposed to sunlight again. This is because in space conditions, like other onboard systems, undercharged batteries can fail (for example, with deep hypothermia).

So it was a pleasant surprise Message Appearing tonight, the Japanese space agency said that communication with SLIM has been re-established and its multispectral cameras have already started transmitting images to Earth. On one of them is a “toy poodle”, one of the tiles standing next to SLIM’s contact point.

Restoring communications is important because before landing, the module dropped two lunar rovers onto the Moon (from an extremely low altitude) using new principles of locomotion: a “planet hop” that moves in jumps and will help it explore the slopes earlier. an exotic device that is inaccessible to robots and even has variable shape. The lunar module was an intermediate transmitter for them, and without it, communicating with Earth with a low-power onboard transmitter would be problematic.

A lunar day lasts 14 days, part of which the device will not be illuminated by the Sun. Additionally, SLIM does not have a powerful internal radioisotope heating source like the Soviet lunar rovers, so it is unlikely to survive a lunar night when the temperature on Selene drops to minus 173 degrees Celsius. However, even the limited operating time of the device can provide a lot of important data, for example, about the operation of two unusual lunar rovers.

A special feature of the SLIM mission was the choice of the landing site on a crater slope with a slope of 15 degrees. Before this, no Earth device had ever deliberately attempted to land on a surface with a significant slope. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency believed that if we wanted to effectively explore the subpolar regions of the Moon, where the terrain was littered with craters and steep slopes, we needed to learn how to do it. Judging by the pictures from the lunar rover, the Japanese module really managed to land without problems, but still not as its creators planned.