Photo shows Japan’s lunar lander landed upside down

2024-01-30 11:46:55

“A photograph of Japan’s robotic lunar lander shows that, although the spacecraft made the trip of a quarter of a million mile to the lunar surface, it landed upside down…” reports Mashable. Because of the lander’s apparent inverted position, its solar panels were not oriented correctly to generate power, according to the space agency. The team decided to conserve energy by shutting down the craft. space approximately 2.5 hours after landing.

What’s perhaps as surprising as the lander photo is how it was taken. Two small rovers separated from the uncrewed mothership just before landing. It was one of these baseball-sized robots the one who was able to take the image of the spacecraft with its head in the lunar dust. The rover, built with the help of Japanese toy maker Takara Tomy, is a sphere that splits in half to expose a pair of cameras that point forward and backward. The two hemispheres also become the rover’s wheels. ”

The company is perhaps most famous for originally creating the Transformers, the alien robots that can disguise themselves as machines,” said Elizabeth Tasker, who provided commentary on the moon landing in English on Jan. 20.

It sure went wrong. About 55 meters above the ground, the spacecraft performed an obstacle avoidance maneuver, part of the precision landing demonstration. Just before this step, one of the two main engines stopped working, throwing the lander off course. JAXA continues to investigate the cause of the engine problem… Even though the spacecraft is now inactive, the SLIM team has not lost hope for a recovery. With the solar panels facing west, the lander still has a chance to catch some rays and generate power. If the angle of sunlight changes, SLIM could still wake up, mission officials said.

That would have to happen soon, though. Night will fall on the moon on February 1, bringing frigid temperatures. The spacecraft was not built to withstand those conditions.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft passed over the landing site at an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km) and took your own photography which they say shows “the slight change in reflectance around the lander due to engine exhaust sweeping across the surface.”