Moon lander Slim comes back to life and resumes mission

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said it re-established contact with the lander Sunday night, indicating that the glitch had been fixed.

The spacecraft ran on battery power for several hours before authorities decided to turn it off to allow for a possible recovery of electricity when the angle of sunlight changed.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Jaxa shared a photograph taken by Slim of a nearby rock that it nicknamed a "toy poodle".

Jaxa could not immediately say until when Slim will operate on the moon. It has previously said the lander was not designed to survive a lunar night. A lunar night, which is when the surface of the moon is not exposed to the sun, lasts about 14 days.

Earlier this month, a US spacecraft launched by a private operator ended its lunar mission in flames over the Pacific. In August last year, Russia's first lunar spacecraft in decades crashed into the Moon after spinning out of control.