Japan has pulled off one of the hardest tricks in space exploration: a soft landing on the moon. Its "Moon Sniper" mission settled onto the moon's surface Friday morning. But JAXA, the Japanese space agency, says that while the lander is communicating with Earth, it's not getting power from its solar panels.
"SLIM [for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon] has been communicating to the Earth station and it is receiving commands from the Earth accurately and the spacecraft is responding to these in a normal way," said Hitoshi Kuninaka, director general of Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.
