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The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:39 a.m. (0839 GMT), with an alternate date of Thursday.
SpaceX is scheduled to launch the first private and Japanese lunar lander on Wednesday.
The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 3:39 a.m. (0839 GMT), with an alternate date of Thursday.
So far, only the United States, Russia, and China have managed to place robots on lunar surface.
The mission, carried out by Japanese company ispace, is the first of a project called Hakuto-R.
According to a company statement, the lander will touch down on the visible side of the moon, known as Atlas Crater, around April 2023.
It measures just over 2 x 2.5 meters and carries a 10kg rover called Rashid, built in the United Arab Emirates.The oil-rich country is a newcomer space race But count recent successes, including the 2020 Mars probe. If successful, Rashid will be the Arab world’s first moon mission.
“We’ve accomplished so much in just six years since we first started conceiving the project in 2016,” said ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada.
Hakuto was one of five finalists in the international Google Lunar XPrize competition, a challenge to land a rover on the moon by the 2018 deadline, which ended with no winners. But some projects are still in progress.
Another finalist from the Israeli organization SpaceIL crashed into the ground while trying to land in April 2019, failing to become the first privately funded mission to achieve the feat.
ispace, which has just 200 employees, says it “aims to extend the reach of human life into space, and by providing high frequency, a low-cost transportation service to the Moon. “
Future missions will contribute to NASA’s Artemis program. Artemis-1, an uncrewed lunar test flight, is currently underway.
NASA hopes to develop a lunar economy in the coming years by establishing a lunar economy. space station In orbit around the moon, there is a base on the lunar surface.
It has contracts with several companies to develop landers to carry science experiments to the surface.
Among them, U.S. companies Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are reportedly set to take off in 2023 and may reach their destination before ispace via a more direct route.
© 2022 AFP
quote: Japanese firm aims to place first private lander on Moon, aboard UAE rover (2022, 29 November), accessed 29 November 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022- 11-japanese-company-aims-private-lander.html
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