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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A Tokyo company aimed its own private lander at the moon Sunday, blasting off on a SpaceX rocket with the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover and a Japanese one. A toy-like robot designed to roll upwards in gray dust.
It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the moon.
ispace designs ships that use the least amount of fuel to save money and leave more room for cargo. So it’s making its way to the Moon on a slow, low-energy journey, traveling 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth before returning to intersect with the Moon at the end of April.
In contrast, NASA’s Orion crew capsule with test dummy It took five days to reach the moon last month. The lunar flyby mission ended Sunday with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.
The ispace lander will target Atlas Crater on the northeast near side of the moon, which is more than 50 miles (87 kilometers) in diameter and just over a mile (2 kilometers) deep. The lander’s four legs stick out, reaching a height of more than 7 feet (2.3 meters).
With a scientific satellite orbiting Mars, the UAE also wants to explore the moon. Its probe, named Rashid after the royal family of Dubai, weighs just 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and will remain on the ground for about 10 days, like everything else on the mission.
Hamad AlMarzooqi, Emirates program manager, said landing on an unexplored part of the moon would yield “novel and extremely valuable” scientific data. Additionally, the lunar surface is an “ideal platform” for testing new technologies that could be used in eventual human expeditions to Mars.
There’s also national pride — the rover represents “a pioneering national effort in space and a historic moment that, if successful, will be the first time the UAE and Arab countries have landed on the lunar surface,” he said in a statement afterward. Said to take off.
Additionally, the lander is carrying an orange-sized sphere from the Japanese space agency that will transform into a wheeled robot on the moon. Also flying: solid-state batteries from Japan’s Spark Plug company; a flight computer from an Ottawa, Ontario company with artificial intelligence to identify geological features seen by a UAE rover; and a 360-degree camera from a Toronto-area company.
Riding on the rocket is a small NASA laser experiment that is now heading to the moon on its own to search for ice in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole.
The ispace mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for White Rabbit. In Asian folklore, it is said that a white rabbit lived on the moon. Private companies are planning a second moon landing in 2024 and a third in 2025.
ispace was established in 2010 and was shortlisted Google Lunar XPRIZE The competition calls for a successful moon landing by 2018. The rover built by ispace was never launched.
Another finalist is an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL, which successfully landed on the moon in 2019. But it didn’t land softly, The Beresheet spaceship crashes into the moon and is destroyed.
With a predawn launch Sunday from the Cape Canaveral space station, ispace is now on track to become one of the first private entities to try and land on the moon. Although it won’t launch until early next year, a lunar lander built by Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology and Houston’s Intuitive Machines could beat ispace to the moon due to its shorter cruise time.
Only Russia, the United States and China have achieved so-called “soft landings” on the moon, starting with the former Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in 1966. Only the United States has sent astronauts to the lunar surface: 12 people have made 6 landings.
Sunday, December 11, 1972, marked the 50th anniversary of the last Moon landing by Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt.
NASA’s Apollo moon missions were all “excitement about technology,” said ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada, who was not yet alive. Now, “it’s the excitement of business.”
“This is the dawn of the lunar economy,” Hakamada noted during the SpaceX launch webcast. “Let’s go to the moon.”
Liftoff was supposed to happen two weeks ago, but was delayed by SpaceX for additional rocket inspections.
Eight minutes after launch, the recovered first-stage booster returned to Cape Canaveral under a nearly full moon, with twin sonic booms echoing across the night sky.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Division is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The Associated Press is solely responsible for all content.
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