Japan’s long-planned intelligent lunar lander has successfully landed on the moon’s surface, making it the fifth country in history to do so. But all is not well for Moderate buildwhich may have a limited lifespan due to a problem with its solar cells.
in Press Conference After the early morning (local time) landing on the Moon, JAXA and mission managers explained that “the soft landing was a success in itself; SLIM has been communicating and taking orders. However, it appears that the solar cell is not generating electricity at this time.”
Solar cells can be finicky, as can the rest of electrical work in space — and let’s be honest, the whole thing is usually pretty finicky — so the team hasn’t yet been able to pinpoint the problem. However, since the other sensors are working properly and showing healthy values, they feel confident that it is just the solar cells themselves.
Battery-powered operation is of course not a long-term solution, and if they can’t get the cells online, the main lander will only have a few hours of life (and may in fact by this time have already reached the end of that).
The state and the agency should be congratulated on their achievement; Landing on the moon is not an easy matter, and indeed many countries and private companies have made attempts in the past few years, and none of them succeeded. Something as small as a stuck valve (as on the recent Astrobotic mission) could derail an attempt to reach the Moon.
There is some speculation based on telemetry that the lander may have skewed or been in some less-than-ideal material configuration, but so far the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has no confirmation of this. The initial press conference was intended primarily to announce the initial success of the soft landing and operation of the lunar lander.
However, the team noted that the two lunar rovers carried by SLIM appear to have been successfully deployed. These two sub-vehicles were launched from the main vehicle while flying a few meters above the surface, and will operate almost independently of it.
The LEV-1 and LEV-2 (as they are called) should be able to take images of the landing zone and the SLIM itself, but “unfortunately, that’s not something we can show you right away,” they said. Assuming the sub-vehicles are working, they should be sending that information soon.
This story is under development, and we will update it as new information becomes available from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.