Moon lander of Japan achieves soft landing

 

Moon lander of Japan has resumed operations, indicating that the  power has been restored, the space agency said on X (formerly Twitter). "Last evening we succeeded in initiating communication with SLIM, and restarted the operations."

Allude to the multiband of lander's qualitative analysis camera, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said, “We immediately started scientific observations with the  MBC, and we obtained successfully  first light for 10-band observation." The agency also posted on X an image shot by the probe of a "toy poodle", a rock observed near the lander.

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Prematurely this month, the touchdown made Japan only the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, after the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and India. But after the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) touched down, JAXA had said that it could not confirm that the lightweight craft's solar batteries were generating power or not.

The SLIM, which was aiming to hit a very small target, is a lightweight spacecraft about the size of a passenger vehicle. It was using “pinpoint landing" technology that promises far greater control than any previous moon landing.