Japan's Moon Lander Snaps Final Photo, Goes Dormant Before 354-Hour Lunar Night (mashable.com) 12
"Japan's first moon mission has likely come to an end after a surprising late-game comeback," reports Mashable, "with the spacecraft taking one last photo of its surroundings before the deep-freeze of night... showing ominous shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon."
Since Monday, the spacecraft has analyzed rocks around the crater with a multi-band spectral camera. JAXA picked the landing spot because of what it could tell scientists about the moon's formation... The special camera completed its planned observation, able to study more targets than originally expected, according to an English translation of a news release from the space agency... "Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with (analyses) to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon," JAXA said in a statement translated by Google...
The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.
In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that "Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells."
Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again "just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk."
The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.
In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that "Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells."
Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again "just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk."
dirt nap (Score:3)
Japan's moon lander takes a dirt nap, again.
Re: (Score:2)
Come on, sleeping more because of fewer calories is a lot better than making yet another crater on the Moon.
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Honestly, Japan has done outstanding work with their moon lander. Space is hard and it takes a teams of people all doing the right things to succeed.
Lemonade (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Lemonade (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Lemonade (Score:5, Insightful)
The primary objective was precision navigation to a landing area 100m in diameter. They achieved that on the first attempt, and the fact that the difficult landing on a slope didn't go to plan is actually a win of a sort. Allow me to explain.
One of the photos of the landing area as the probe was descending shows the cone from one of the engines falling away. It appears to have broken off, as another one on a different Japanese probe did a few years ago. So they navigated and landed with only one or two engines.
That is a huge achievement. Most robotic spacecraft can't automatically handle situations like that. At best, ground control might see the problem and send some new software or commands to mitigate it. The JAXA software was able to handle it by itself, and still achieved a precision landing.
The moon is always receiving sunlight (Score:4, Interesting)
Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when that location on the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks.
Yeah, not to be pedantic, but mashable's wording makes it sound like the entire moon doesn't receive sunlight for two weeks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No. As you mentioned, one side of the moon is tidal locked to always face the earth and it takes 28 days to revolve around the earth. This means the moon's "day" is 28 earth days long. When we see a "full moon", the side facing the earth is in daylight. A week later the moon revolves and we see a waning moon - half in sunlight, half not in sunlight. It is not in shadow from anything just like the night side of the earth is not in shadow from anything (except itself).
A week later the moon revolves so it