Japan's moon lander survives second lunar night, beating predictions

when temperatures can fall to minus 170 degrees Celsius (minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit).

Truly impressive at those extreme temperatures!

Congrats to the Japanese government - and all who played a part in engineering SLIM. Laying the groundwork for Japan putting people on the moon - hopefully within a decade.

Transformer bots on the Moon. Completely awesome.

Great work by the Japanese team! But one has to ask why wasn't it designed to withstand such temperature extremes.

Total failure!!!!!!!!, they call it a soft landing....

Total failure!!!!!!!!

For it to be a total failure, it would have had to fail leaving earth.

Good show, JAXA! Keep up the good work!

Nice. I remember the Apollo moon landings. It inspired a generation. This will do the same.

Highly doubtful! Kids here are more interested in what is on their smart phone!

Bet any money that the majority of kids here in Japan, and probably none anywhere else even are aware that Japan sent a probe to the moon in the first place.

toraToday 08:09 am JST

Great work by the Japanese team! But one has to ask why wasn't it designed to withstand such temperature extremes.

Good question Tora.

The lander has a system for heating internal components to a temperature that keeps them safe and functioning.

This system is powered by the solar array and batteries.

With the incorrect orientation of the solar array there is not enough electricity to keep the internal heaters running for the whole lunar night.

@bush: remember the Apollo moon landings

Unfortunate that the anti-American right, US and foreign, have claimed the moon landings were fake, but that's typical of those pushing a firehose of falsehoods in attempts to dupe the more poorly educated and others favoring totalitarianism.

This is great news. Sticking the landing was the main objective of the mission, and that was achieved (despite an engine failure). Getting even more data is a very nice bonus on top of that.

This new landing tech will be extremely useful for Artemis and beyond.

indigoToday 08:46 am JST

Total failure!!!!!!!!, they call it a soft landing....

They call it a soft landing because it was a soft landing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_landing

A soft landing is any type of aircraft, rocket or spacecraft landing that does not result in significant damage to or destruction of the vehicle or its payload, as opposed to a hard landing.

Excellent!!..

Well done JAXA..

GO JAPAN!!..

I don't remember if it was here... but people were realy negative when the news about SLIM landing "failed", and saying that Japanese technology is obsolete, outdated, wrong and so on.

But then just the other day the lunar lander IM-1 from a joint venture of NASA and a private company, also landed and tiped of uncorrectly.

Landing technology something remotely is difficult, both landers perhaps didn't success 100% but, they certainly didn't fail, more over it were succesful at least in 70 % (for the japanese prove)

Great news. Go Jaxa!

I think freezing is an understatement.

you know why the instrument is still functioning now? because it is Japan technology! truly amazing

The official song lyrics of the mission,

Upside down

Boy, you turn me inside out

And 'round and 'round

Upside down

PTownsendToday 09:11 am JST

@bush: remember the Apollo moon landings

Unfortunate that the anti-American right, US and foreign, have claimed the moon landings were fake, but that's typical of those pushing a firehose of falsehoods in attempts to dupe the more poorly educated and others favoring totalitarianism.

Doubting the authenticity of the manned mission to the moon has nothing to do with politics, though.