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Kravis Crater on the Moon.Photo: NASA/USGS
A Japanese company is about to make history by landing on the moon in a tiny lunar rover.
A month ago, Tokyo’s ispace company put its own spacecraft into orbit around the moon, trying to do something no other private company had ever done.
Media reports said that on Tuesday (April 25), flight controllers will command the spacecraft Hakuto (white rabbit in Japanese) to descend from an altitude of 100 kilometers and land on the moon.
The 7-foot-tall lander carries a tiny lunar rover for the United Arab Emirates and a toy-like robot from Japan designed to roll in lunar dust.
After blasting off in December, the White Rabbit followed a long and circuitous route to the moon, beaming back photos of Earth along the way.
make history
If the White Rabbit successfully lands on the moon, it will become the first privately built lander in history to successfully land on Earth’s only natural satellite.
Only three governments have managed to soft-land on the moon: Russia, the United States and China.
In 2019, an Israeli-built spacecraft attempted the first privately funded moon landing, but it lost all communications with Earth just before touchdown. The lander was later confirmed to have crashed into the moon, media reports said.
A similar accident happened in India that same year, when the Chandrayaan-2 lander was unable to decelerate fast enough for a soft landing on the moon.
Earlier this month, ISRO said the main goal of the Chandrayaan-3 follow-up mission is to land on the moon precisely.
(according to agency opinion)
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