M Thomas Apple Author Page

A Japanese robot has successfully touched down on the Moon but problems with its solar power system mean the mission may live for just a few hours.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim) put itself gently on the lunar surface near an equatorial crater.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68035314

Or SLIM, if you want to actually write acronyms properly (snark).

Also, it’s JAXA, not Jaxa. And NASA and ESA, not Nasa and Esa. But I digress.

Anyways, kudos but too bad yet another space mission failed. At this point I’m wondering how on Earth NASA managed to land people on the Moon so successfully in the 1960s and 1970s without killing half of them in the process. We can barely manage to get a tiny robot rover the size of a marble to land (see the link above for the picture of the “hopper” and “shape shifting” ball…curious about the “shape shifting” bit…)