Transformers on the Moon
On January 19, the Japanese space agency’s SLIM module, the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon, made a successful descent onto the surface of our satellite, making Japan a member of an elite club of five.
Frustratingly, not all went to plan. SLIM’s monitors showed that its batteries were rapidly losing power, prompting the agency to turn it off two and a half hours after the landing to preserve them. Initial investigations suggest that during the approach process, one of the thrusters momentarily turned off and caused the module to reach the lunar surface upside down, preventing its solar panels from generating energy. But all is not lost: the solar panels can still generate small amounts of energy when the Sun shines in the right direction, which could help meet some of the mission’s research objectives.
The photograph showing the spacecraft on the lunar surface is simply stunning, which made me wonder how it was possible to obtain this close-up, high-res photograph of a spacecraft that has crash-landed on the surface of the moon, some 384,400 km from our planet? NASA’ s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has been orbiting the moon for fourteen years now, has confirmed that the Japanese module is where it should be, but its image is a blurry dot, which is all the resolution from 2009 (when it was launched) allows, and is no help in locating it and much less…
