The Japanese lunar lander SLIM? Guess what!

[thewayne]

IT SURVIVED ITS THIRD LUNAR NIGHT!

Now, this is a probe/lander that HAS NO HEATERS. It was not expected to survive ONE lunar night, much less two. And now it has survived THREE!

The little enginespace probe that could!

It is degrading, of course. Batteries and sensors are failing. But what do you expect? It is so far beyond its operational lifetime and parameters, this is inevitable. But the fact that it is not totally dead is simply amazing.

Now will we see it come back to life after the fourth night? Time will tell.

I recommend clicking on the comments section, they're quite amusing.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/25/slim_another_lunar_night/

Comments

[disneydream06]

I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. :) :) :)

Fingers crossed it makes another night. :)
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Pretty darn amazing!

[darkoshi]

It takes a licking and keeps on ticking!

Do you hear about this?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/after-months-of-gibberish-voyager-1-is-communicating-well-again/

[thewayne]

I did!  I think that's just awesome that they could reprogram it remotely to map out the bad memory and write around it. Back in the early '80s I worked for a play-by-mail game company, Flying Buffalo.  We had a small Raytheon computer with, IIRC, 64k words of magnetic core memory.  It used punched-tape I/O.  The problem with magnetic core memory is you can't just reboot it if a program ever glitched or crashed.  While I never saw it, apparently they had a spot in the memory cage where they'd insert a length of 2x4 and then WHACK the daylights out of it with a rubber mallet!  This would randomize the memory.  Then they'd reinitialize the machine's operating system, reload the program, and it was back to normal ops.

[silveradept]

I sincerely hope the engineering team there is being scrutinized (in a good way) for having built a device that, even though it landed in the wrong orientation, has made it through three lunar nights when it wasn't expected to last one. There's a lot to be gleaned from their design and decisions here, even if they're not entirely sure how this happened.