The Japanese space agency JAXA announced on Wednesday that the Japanese SLIM probe, which landed on the moon at the end of January, survived its third lunar night, which lasted about two weeks on Earth, more permanently than expected.
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The space agency was again able to contact the probe and published on X a new image of the moon’s surface taken by the spacecraft.
“SLIM has retained its main functions,” welcomed Jaxa, which initially warned that this small unit was not designed to withstand extremely cold temperatures (up to -130 degrees Celsius) on lunar nights.
“We will continue to carefully monitor the condition of SLIM and check which of its parts are likely to deteriorate the most” depending on the day and night on the Moon, JAXA added.
Thanks to SLIM, which landed with a high degree of accuracy on the moon's surface, Japan became the fifth country in the world to succeed in landing on the moon's surface, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China and India.
This probe is supposed to analyze rocks on the Moon's surface coming from its “mantle”, i.e. its internal structure, which is still not well understood.
