The Japanese space agency (JAXA) announced on Wednesday that the Japanese probe SLIM survived its third icy lunar night, which lasted nearly two Earth weeks, showing greater endurance than expected.
The Japanese Space Agency again succeeded in communicating this probe, and released a new image of the Moon's surface by “Slim” at the “X” site.
It started again last night (4/23 night). #SLIM We successfully interacted with SLIM and confirmed that SLIM achieved its third overnight win. Here is a picture of the lunar surface taken last night by the navigation camera. The image is always taken in the early phase of the moon after nightfall, so the image is overall brighter and shadows are minimal. #jaxa #Happiness pic.twitter.com/U0f88xNK9S
— Small Lunar Landing Vehicle SLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) April 24, 2024
The agency, which first confirmed that “Slim” was not designed to withstand extremely cold temperatures (-130 degrees Celsius) during lunar nights, pointed out that the “probe succeeded in continuing its main missions”.
As day and night alternate on the moon, he added, “we will continue to carefully monitor the state of the probe and confirm any areas that may be damaged.”
With “Salim”, which landed on the surface of the Moon with high precision on January 20, Japan became the fifth country after the United States, Soviet Union, China and India to successfully land on Earth's natural satellite.
The purpose of the study is to analyze the rocks on the moon's surface, which come from its inner structure called the lunar mantle, about which not much data is yet available.
