La sonde japonaise sur la Lune rencontre des problèmes de panneaux solaires, mais pourrait redémarrer

The Japanese space agency (JAXA) announced Monday that it had turned off the electrical power to its Slim module less than three hours after its historic landing on Saturday, in order to save its batteries for a possible restart. JAXA added that there is a “possibility” that the Japanese Slim module, which encountered a problem with solar panels, could be restarted.

“According to telemetry data, Slim’s solar cells are facing west. If sunlight hits the Moon from the west in the future, we believe it is possible to generate power, and we are currently preparing for restoration,” the space agency said. “We have been able to complete the transmission of technical data and images acquired during the descent and on the lunar surface before power was cut off,” JAXA said on social network X, adding that a “large volume of data” had been received.

On Saturday, Japan became the fifth country to successfully land on the Moon. After a thrilling 20-minute descent, JAXA announced that the SLIM module (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) had landed at 00:20 on Saturday (Friday 15:20 GMT) and that communication with it had been established.

But due to a lack of working solar panels, the device, nicknamed “Moon Sniper” for its ability to land precisely, had electricity for only “several hours,” warned Hitoshi Kuninaka, one of the JAXA officials. It is possible that the panels will work again when the angle of the sun has changed, it said, while the team was striving to maximize the mission’s scientific results by transmitting the obtained data to Earth.

SLIM is part of many lunar missions recently launched by countries and private companies. But so far, only the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and most recently India, have succeeded in landing on the Moon.

The head of NASA, the U.S. space agency, Bill Nelson, sent his “congratulations (to Japan) on becoming the fifth country in history to successfully land on the Moon.” “We appreciate our partnership in the cosmos and our ongoing collaboration,” he added.

JAXA hopes to analyze the data obtained during landing to determine if the module reached its goal of landing within 100 meters of its target. SLIM landed in a small crater less than 300 meters in diameter, called Shioli, from where it was to conduct ground analyses. The two mini-rovers carried by SLIM were released normally, JAXA said, including a spherical probe called SORA-Q, barely larger than a tennis ball, and capable of changing its shape to move on the lunar surface. It was developed by JAXA, in partnership with the Japanese toy giant Takara Tomy.

Even if the accuracy of the landing must be confirmed, “I think the mission is a great success,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Several problems could potentially be the cause of the solar panel issue, he told the AFP. “A detached cable, a cable connected in the wrong direction, or the lander might be upside down and not see the sun for some reason,” Mr. McDowell suggested.

More than 50 years after the first steps of humans on the Moon – the Americans in 1969 – it has become the subject of a global race again. In addition to the United States and China, Russia also dreams of reclaiming the space glory of the former USSR, by partnering with China or India, which succeeded last summer with their first lunar landing.

The first two attempts by Japan had gone awry. In 2022, a JAXA probe, Omotenashi, aboard the American mission Artemis 1, suffered a fatal battery failure shortly after its release into space. And in April 2023, a lander from the young Japanese private company ispace crashed on the Moon’s surface, having missed the soft landing stage.