Japan's Moon Lander Snaps Final Photo, Goes Dormant Before 354-Hour Lunar Night

'Japan's first moon mission has likely come to an end after a surprising late-game comeback,' reports Mashable, 'with the spacecraft taking one last photo of its surroundings before the deep-freeze of night... showing ominous shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon.'

Since Monday, the spacecraft has analyzed rocks around the crater with a multi-band spectral camera. JAXA picked the landing spot because of what it could tell scientists about the moon's formation... The special camera completed its planned observation, able to study more targets than originally expected, according to an English translation of a news release from the space agency... 'Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with (analyses) to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon,' JAXA said in a statement translated by Google...

The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called 'lunar night,' when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.

In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that 'Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells.'

Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again 'just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.