Lunar night puts Japan's lander back to sleep

… but will resume its mission if it survives the two-week lunar night, the space agency said Thursday.

"Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, …

According to Reuters, “JAXA has previously said the lander was not designed to survive a lunar night.”

GO JAXA..

GO JAPAN..

It’s good to know that Japan’s space technology has survived the three decades of tight fiscal policy and no economic growth.

Can't the bloke taken the photo just correct its positioning ??? Can't be that heavy and lt is lighter due to the moon gravity.

Breaking new ground in scientific discovery to be sure.

Spectacular nosedive award

Maybe next time use the weeble design from 1971, so that it will right itself.

A few questions about the image which leaves me scratching my head. Maybe someone can answer them?

Why no stars?

The foreground and background are both in focus. How does that work?

Why the pixelation along the line where the foreground meets the background? Also on the right side of the lander and hilltop if you zoom in.

Why is the middle of the image saturated in light? Studio lighting?

Where are the solar panels? The lander looks to be upside down.

Use the billions of yen to feed the poor and raise the wages of everyone here in Japan instead. I couldn't care less about the moon other than enjoying its beauty from Earth.

Glad to see they got some more data from this. Even if the lander doesn't wake up again (which it isn't designed to anyway), the mission achieved its primary objective of landing within 100m of the target, which is a world-first and will be invaluable for future JAXA and Artemis missions.

All credit to the JAXA engineers who made this possible.

Someone should spend them a real high-spec camera. lol

There are no stars in the photo for a couple of reasons:

1) The Sun is very, very, bright. Thus the image exposure time is very, very, short. Too short to record stars.

2) The little LEV that took the image necessarily must have a very small lens. Very small lenses (plus short exposure times) aren't conducive to imaging stars.

I live in Houston and had the fortunate occasion once to ask an astronaut if stars were visible from earth orbit when they were on the sun side of the earth. He said no. Too much light reflecting off earth. Your eye pupils adjust to the bright light making stars mostly invisible.

Sven AsaiToday 11:10 am JST

Someone should spend them a real high-spec camera. lol

It's not a normal camera for pretty pictures. It's a "Multiband Spectroscopic Camera" for mineral composition analysis.

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2021/pdf/2303.pdf

Sorry, I'm talking above about the one on the lander (low resolution is a common complaint about the images taken from it).

They need a manned mission from the US to flip this thing over :)

@GreenPeasFeb.

A few questions about the image which leaves me scratching my head. Maybe someone can answer them?

Why no stars?

The foreground and background are both in focus. How does that work?

Why the pixelation along the line where the foreground meets the background? Also on the right side of the lander and hilltop if you zoom in.

Why is the middle of the image saturated in light? Studio lighting?

Where are the solar panels? The lander looks to be upside down.

1 Why no stars?

The reason why stars are not visible in pictures taken from the moon is due to the camera settings used. Most cameras were set to capture the moon's surface or astronauts in focus, not the dimmer, distant stars. The stars are there, but they are too faint to show up in the photographs. The camera settings, such as exposure and dynamic range, are adjusted to capture the primary subjects, making the stars appear dim or invisible in the background

2 The foreground and background are both in focus. How does that work?

The ability to capture the foreground and background in focus in a picture is determined by the camera's aperture, focal length, and distance to the subjects. A smaller aperture (higher f-stop number) and a shorter distance to the subjects result in a larger depth of field, keeping both the foreground and background in focus. 

3 Why the pixelation along the line where the foreground meets the background? Also on the right side of the lander and hilltop if you zoom in.

The pixelation along the line where the foreground meets the background in the picture taken by the Japanese moon lander could be due to a variety of factors, including the camera's image resolution, bit depth, and the merging of rendered foreground with a separately rendered background. The unconventional optical properties of the lunar surface can also affect the reflectance models, which may contribute to the distinctive pixelation. Additionally, the autonomy of the spacecraft and the camera coordinate transformation relative to the spacecraft can play a role in the quality of the image

4 Why is the middle of the image saturated in light? Studio lighting?

The middle of the image taken by Japan's SLIM moon lander is saturated in light due to the spacecraft's solar panels being illuminated by the sun. The spacecraft's solar cells faced westward, which affected its ability to receive sunlight, initially cutting its operations on the lunar surface short. The final image taken by SLIM's navigation camera on Jan. 31 shows the surroundings before dusk, with shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon

5 Where are the solar panels? The lander looks to be upside down.

The Japanese moon lander, SLIM, landed upside down, causing its solar panels to point in the wrong direction and leading to a loss of power.

Yes, despite the article's "at a wonky angle" wording, it is in fact upside down.

Cynicism on/ Glad that no one has bothered to tell us how much they were able to recharge the lander's batteries between the 28th when it miraculously came alive and started working again and 1st Feb when it went sleepy-byes, a trivial detail that would surely bore most ordinary people.//off.

isabelleFeb. 2  10:13 am JST

Glad to see they got some more data from this. Even if the lander doesn't wake up again (which it isn't designed to anyway), the mission achieved its primary objective of landing within 100m of the target, which is a world-first and will be invaluable for future JAXA and Artemis missions.

All credit to the JAXA engineers who made this possible.

Kudos to them. Nobody said this would be easy, and there will be more explorations and findings to come.

Good job, JAXA.