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Japan’s Moon lander has survived the harsh lunar night, the sunless and freezing equivalent to two Earth weeks.
“Last night, a command was sent to #SLIM and a response received,” national space agency Jaxa said on X.
The craft was put into sleep mode after an awkward landing in January left its solar panels facing the wrong way and unable to generate power.
A change in sunlight direction later allowed it to send pictures back but it shut down again as lunar night fell.
Jaxa said at the time that Slim (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) was not designed for the harsh lunar nights.
It said it planned to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun would shine again on Slim’s solar cells.
“The news that SLIM has rebooted itself after the cold lunar night is significant,” said Dr Simeon Barber from the UK’s Open University. “Surviving lunar night is one of the key technological challenges to be overcome if we are to establish long-lived robotic or human missions on the Moon.”
Dr Barber explained that Slim landed near the Moon’s equator, where the lunar surface reaches more than 100C at noon, but then plunges to -130C during the lunar night.
Jaxa said that communication with the lander was terminated after a short time – it was lunar midday, meaning the temperature of the communications equipment was very high.
It said preparations were being made to resume operations when instrument temperatures had cooled sufficiently.
During its previous brief period of re-awakening, Slim was able to study its surroundings in detail and transmit new images to Earth.
Jaxa will be hoping that having survived the lunar night it will be able to continue its work.
The landing in January made Jaxa only the fifth national space agency to achieve a soft touchdown on the Moon – after the US, the former Soviet Union, China and India.
A US spacecraft, the Odysseus Moon lander, made history on Thursday by becoming the first ever privately built and operated robot to complete a soft lunar touchdown.
Like Slim, it also landed awkwardly. Controllers at the operating company, Intuitive Machines, think their robot tipped on to its side at the moment of touchdown. Odysseus does, however, appear still to be functional and is communicating with Earth.
No pictures from the mission at the surface have yet been released.