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\n The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) achieved a major milestone when its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed on the Moon on January 19, 2024.<\/p>\n
JAXA<\/p>\n
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JAXA<\/p>\n
Two tiny transforming robots landed on the moon! They accompanied Japan’s first successful lunar lander called SLIM – Smart Lander for Investigating Moon and are the size of a baseball. They rolled out of SLIM as balls and transformed into a rover by cracking down the middle, each half of the sphere moving outward revealing a little camera in the center. The halves act as spinning wheels and help them waddle, bounce and roll over hard terrain. These little rovers are autonomous and designed to scout out the terrain ahead of larger rovers or go places they can’t.<\/p>\n
Interested in more space science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. It includes perks like bonus episodes, early access, archive access, curated playlists and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Listen to Short Wave on Spotify<\/a> and Apple Podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n This episode was produced by Berly McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez, Ted Mebane and Hannah Gluvna.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) achieved a major milestone when its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":746865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-746864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/746865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}