Canada Global (Web News) The first lunar rover from the United Arab Emirates and a toy-like Japanese robot that is intended to roll around up there in the grey dust were launched on board a SpaceX rocket by a Tokyo business on Sunday.
The journey to the moon of the lander and its associated experiments will take about five months.
For financial reasons and to provide greater capacity for freight, the business ispace built its craft to utilise less fuel. Therefore, it is travelling 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth before turning around and colliding with the moon at the end of April.
In comparison, it took NASA’s Orion crew capsule and test dummies five days to reach the moon last month. The lunar flyby mission comes to an end with the splashdown in the Pacific on Sunday.
The Atlas crater, measuring more than 50 miles (87 kilometres) broad and little over one mile (2 kilometres) deep, is located in the northeastern region of the moon’s near side and will be target of the ispace lander. The lander stands taller than 7 feet (2.3 metres) when all four of its legs are extended.
The UAE intends to examine the moon in addition to Mars, where a science satellite is already in orbit. Just like everything else on the project, the rover, dubbed Rashid after the royal family of Dubai, weighs only 22 pounds (10 kilogrammes) and will function on the surface for roughly 10 days.
A landing on an uncharted region of the moon will produce “new and very valuable” scientific data, according to Emirates project manager Hamad AlMarzooqi. The lunar surface is also “an ideal platform” for testing new technology that may be applied to future human missions to Mars.
