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 📻 ).
LEV-1 also hopped 7 times on the Moon to become the world's 1st fully autonomous explorer.
...although I'm not sure how this compares with the Hayabusa2 MINERVA-II1 rovers, which also hopped whenever they felt in the mood 🤔
It looks like LEV-1 was able to check gravity direction before and after hopping, which was more sophisticated that the little MINERVA-II1s, that just charged up and BOING'd. MINERVA-II1 also needed Hayabusa2 to talk to Earth, so perhaps aren't 100% "autonomous"...
LEV-2 (SORA-Q) also bags "smallest & lightest" lunar exploration robot, as it left the communication up to LEV-1. It's also the "absolute cutest", but I admit that wasn't explicitly mentioned but I'm sure taken as read.
LEV-2 autonomously takes photos and selects the best to send to Earth. So it totally picked the photo of SLIM on its head, undoubtedly laughed wildly while rolling around, and sent it on.
I think... the batteries cooked during the lunar day (~70C) and the rovers are no more.
@elizabethtasker Given that the expensive lander landed on its head (a trend recently) and the little toys worked perfectly, surely the scientific method now demands that all lunar exploration is done by teeny-totie little transformers. Also, who in JAXA is writing the paper on the now-obvious correlation between robot cuteness and lunar landing success? Enquiring minds need to know!
@elizabethtasker Beforehand, six hops were announced? Also in the press conference a few days after landing, a slide was shown with six hops. But seven kind of matches what we measured (though we have not decoded the telemetry since the schema has not been published).