The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on August 26 that the mission of the SLIM lunar lander has officially concluded.
“We assess that there is no prospect of restoring communication with the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM), and around 22:40 (20:40 Hanoi time) on August 23, we sent a command to cease operations of SLIM,” JAXA stated in a recent announcement.
SLIM lander on the surface of the Moon.
SLIM, or Moon Sniper, successfully landed on the Moon at 22:20 on January 19 (Hanoi time), making Japan the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on this celestial body. Now, approximately eight months after this historic landing, the SLIM mission has concluded. The last communication with Earth occurred at the end of April, but the spacecraft operated much longer than initially expected.
SLIM’s landing made history, but the spacecraft’s tilt significantly reduced the amount of sunlight it received. Consequently, the lander had to operate on battery power immediately instead of solar energy as planned.
However, the primary objective of SLIM has been accomplished: demonstrating the capability of landing on a celestial body with remarkable precision. Its elliptical landing zone encircles a designated point with a distance of 100 meters, significantly smaller than the typical several kilometers. NASA’s Apollo 11 had an elliptical landing zone measuring up to 20km x 5km.
“The landing precision is evaluated with a positional error of about 10 meters from the designated point, confirming the world’s first successful precise landing. The Multi-Band Camera (MBC) successfully conducted spectral observations across 10 wavelengths on 10 rock samples, exceeding expectations. Furthermore, the spacecraft has been confirmed to survive through three lunar nights (equivalent to about six weeks on Earth in extremely cold conditions) and is still operational, demonstrating results far beyond initial goals,” JAXA reported.
The last contact JAXA had with SLIM was on April 28. Over the past four months, numerous efforts were made to re-establish communication with the lander, the most recent being last week, all of which were unsuccessful. However, interesting scientific studies continued even without feedback from the spacecraft.
NASA tested the Laser Retroreflector Network using the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to beam lasers at SLIM. In the future, this technology may help determine the precise location of objects or bases on the Moon and provide landing sites with minimal deviation.
