A commercial lunar race is kicked off by a private moon landers

The HAKUTO-R Mission 1 Landing in Atlas Crater: A New Way to Do Science on the Moon, and How to do that?

The United Arabs of the country will attempt to land on the Moon tomorrow. The HAKUTO-R Mission 1 will be the first commercial mission to land a spaceship on the moon, and both nations will have their first visit to the moon.

M1 was launched on 11 December 2022 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and entered lunar orbit on 21 March. The lunar soil and geology will be studied by the rovers on board.

“This is a new way of doing science on the Moon, a new way of doing business on the Moon as well,” says Abigail Calzada Diaz, a geologist and lunar-exploration specialist at the European Space Resources Innovation Centre in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.

M1’s ultimate destination is Atlas crater, at the outer edge of the Moon’s Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold). Hamid Al-Naimiy says that this region is the only one that hasn’t been explored by previous lunar missions.

The landing sequence is scheduled to start from a 100 kilo altitude on April 25. The ispace mission control team has a long checklist of procedures to complete before initiating the landing process. The Chief Technology Officer of ispace, Ryo Ujiie, stated that this includes checking the external temperature and conditions as well as the craft’s landing sensors and software.

Ujiie says that the craft will adjust its altitude and speed in order to make a soft landing. He warns that it will be the first and only use of the sensor in a lunar environment.

The ispace Moon mission: launching the first Moon mission of the United Arab Emirates, in 2024 and 2025 and examining lunar surface erosion and the solar system

On landing, the craft will need to recharge its battery before deploying its two on-board rovers: the Rashid rover, built by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai, UAE, and a two-wheeled robot built by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The mission is technology demonstration and the M1 will bring along some equipment, including a Canadian company and Japanese space agency rovers.

The Rashid rover will also study lunar dust. “Those are very powdery and have sharp edges, like glass, and can affect the equipment of astronauts and their spacesuits over time,” says AlMaeeni. Finding solutions to surviving lunar dust will be a key step in establishing permanent space stations on the Moon, she adds. The rover will run material-suitability tests. “This experiment will help us in determining suitable materials for hardware in future lunar missions.”

Data from the Moon will be collected by JAXA in order to develop self-driving technology.

Data collected by UAE’s rover will also help scientists study the Solar System. “The lunar surface has a record of the early Solar System,” says Mounib El-Eid, an astrophysicist at the American University of Beirut. He states that Earth has been damaged by surface erosion but the Moon has not.

The M1 will be switched on after 12–14 Earth days after landing on the Moon. This will almost certainly mark the end of its mission: neither the M1 lander nor the Rashid rover are equipped to survive the low temperatures during lunar night. The battery is expected to not work during the second lunar day.

The rover will send the data it collects to the MBRSC. It will take a long time to analyse it, said Al-Naimiy, the president of the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences.

The El-Eid is hoping that the first moon mission of the United Arab Emirates will spur research in the Middle East. The focus should not be on just spending money on building spaceships, says Lebanon’s representative at theAUASS.

ispace is already working on its second and third Moon missions, targeting launches in 2024 and 2025 respectively. Ujiie says they are going to carry their own small rover in mission 2 to do more scientific research.

The M1 lander was lofted on December 11, 2022. After tracing a roundabout, energy-efficient trajectory, it’s expected to reach the surface of Atlas Crater on the ​​southeastern outer edge of Mare Frigoris at about 12:40 pm Eastern time Tuesday, which is 1:40 am Wednesday morning in Japan. (“Moon time” is not a thing yet.) Ispace would be a leader in the lunar space industry if they stuck the landing, as so many companies have plans for their own landers and rovers.

Ispace is the first commercial lunar lander, says Ryo Ujiie, the company’s chief technology officer. The important thing to do is complete the mission and learn from it. Ispace won’t be the first to set down a private craft on the moon. SpaceIL sent a lander called Beresheet but it crashed, along with a payload that included human DNA samples and water bears, tiny animals that can live almost anywhere.

The Ispace lander comes equipped with a large, 400-Newton thruster and six additional thrusters, enabling a controlled descent to the surface. With those thrusters, the navigation system, and four landing legs, Ujiie hopes the craft will achieve a soft touchdown. The company chose its landing site so that engineers at mission control in Tokyo will be able to maintain visual contact and communication with the lander.