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SpaceX will launch a Japanese lander and a United Arab Emirates (UAE) rover to the moon early Wednesday (November 30), and you can watch live.
The Mission 1 of the Japanese company ispace is planned to be SpaceX The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:39 a.m. ET (0839 GMT) Wednesday from Space Force in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
You can watch the live broadcast at Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX, or directly through the company (opens in a new tab). Coverage will begin approximately 15 minutes prior to launch.
Lunar timeline: human exploration of the moon
Mission 1 is ispace’s first flight to help humans build a meaningful footprint on and around Earth moon.
“Our vision is to build an economically viable and sustainable ecosystem on Earth and the Moon [space],” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada told Space.com.
If all goes according to plan, the company’s Hakuto-R lander will touch down in March 2023, becoming the first Japanese-built probe to land on the moon.
Hakuto-R carries a range of payloads for various clients.perhaps most prominently Rashida 22-pound (10-kilogram) rover developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in the United Arab Emirates.
During the ground mission, which is expected to last about 14 Earth days, Rashid will take pictures and characterize the electrically charged environment on the lunar surface, among other tasks.
Mission 1 wasn’t the only piece of hardware flying Wednesday morning.This falcon 9 There will also be a small NASA cube satellite Called the Lunar Torch, it will search for water ice inside craters near the Moon’s south pole.
“We’re bringing actual flashlights to the moon — shining lasers into these dark craters,” said Barbara Cohen, principal investigator of the Lunar Flashlight at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. , to look for clear signs of water ice covering the upper layer of lunar regolith,” Maryland, in a statement (opens in a new tab).
“I’m excited to see our mission contribute to our scientific understanding of where water ice is on the Moon and how it forms,” Cohen added.
Lunar Torch will do the job from Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO).This highly elliptical path will also be taken up by Gateway, the small space station NASA plans to assemble from it artemis program.To date, only one spacecraft has ever occupied a lunar NRHO—CAPSTONE, another NASA CubeSat mission, which Arrived in orbit on November 13.
Wednesday’s liftoff will be the fourth for this particular Falcon 9 first stage, SpaceX wrote in a report. mission details (opens in a new tab).
If all goes according to plan, the booster will return to Earth about 8 minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff, landing at the Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral. The rocket upper stage will deploy Hakuto-R 46.5 minutes into the flight and Lunar Flashlight 6 minutes later.
Mike Wall is “there (opens in a new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or in Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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