It's gentle excitement, as the REAL excitement will be later this summer. There'll be an English summary by your favourite JAXA science communicator afterwards 🙂
The #JAXA ISAS cleanroom facilities (where no more than 1000 mots of dust per cubic foot are allowed to hang in the air) have been expanded.
Because... we're getting another asteroid!
Part of the sample from asteroid Bennu that was returned by #NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will come to JAXA this summer as part of the agreement between the two teamed space agencies.
New Cosmos post (by me 🤸♀️ ) with a peek at the new facilities:
ESA launches EarthCARE satellite to study the impact of clouds on #ClimateChange
The #EarthCARE satellite - a collaboration between #ESA and Japanese space agency #JAXA - will study how the formation of #clouds and the density of #aerosols in the #atmosphere impact the Earth's temperature.
"Earth Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer, or EarthCARE for short, is the most complex Earth Explorer mission to date. The new satellite will look at the role that clouds and aerosols play in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere – contributing to our understanding of climate change."
In other great space news --- JAXA's SLIM lander survived the lunar night!!! We don't know much about the health of the spacecraft, but the communications equipment appears to be functional.
The JAXA SLIM lander, lying in its awkward stance on the lunar surface, responded last night to a command sent by JAXA. Against all hope, it appears that it survived the cold lunar night.
The batteries were expected to get charged around this time, shortly after lunar midday, since the solar panels are facing southwest instead of up.
Apparently, the temperature of the comm equipment was too high, so comms was quickly terminated. Stay tuned!
A talk at the "Space Development and Utilization Subcommittee" meeting reported a little news on the #JAXA SLIM rovers, LEV-1 & LEV-2.
LEV-1 (bigger, ☂️-shaped 🤖 that can talk to Earth) sent radiowaves home for 107 mins, including transmitting data from LEV-2 (SORA-Q: ball transformer that needs LEV-1 to phone home).
This was the world's 1st lunar robot-to-robot communication, 1st direct communication from something so teeny tiny, and 1st amateur ratio station on the Moon (UHF transmitted 📻 ).