Private moon mission prepares for a historic landing attempt

Rashid’s mission to the moon: landing on Atlas crater and at the outer edge of Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold)

A Japanese-made spacecraft carrying the United Arab Emirates’s (UAE) Rashid rover, will attempt to land on the Moon tomorrow. If the mission succeeds, both countries will be the first to visit the lunar surface and the first to do a lunar landing.

M1 was launched on 11 December 22nd from Cape Canaveral, FL and went to the moon on 21 March. In a previously unexplored area, the rovers will study lunar soil and geology.

There is a new way of doing science and business on the Moon as well as on other planets, says an astronomer who works at the European Space ResourcesInnovation Centre in 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 is a region that no previous lunar missions have explored.

The landing sequence of the lander is expected to begin on April 25. The ispace mission control team has a long checklist of procedures to complete before initiating the landing process. Ryo Ujiie is the chief technology officer of ispace and he said that this includes checking the external temperature and conditions.

To ensure a soft landing, the spacecraft will activate its navigation sensor to adjust its altitude and speed, says Ujiie. This carries an “inevitable risk”, he adds, because it will be the first and only use of the sensor in a lunar environment.

The Rashid Space Centre (MAASS) lunar mission aims to boost research in the Middle East and provide a one-way taxi service to the Moon

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).

A Canadian company and two Japanese space agency rovers will be on M1 and they are carrying a technology demonstration.

The Rashid rover will also study lunar dust. They have sharp edges and can affect the equipment of astronauts and their space suits over time. Finding solutions to survive lunar dust will be one of the main tasks in establishing permanent space stations on the Moon. The rover will run material-suitability tests. The experiment will help find suitable materials for hardware in future missions.

JAXA’s baseball-sized robot will collect data on the Moon’s surface, including lunar sand known as regolith, that could help to develop autonomous-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. The Moon has not been exposed to surface erosion like Earth has, according to him.

After landing, the M1 lander will be turned off 12 days after falling 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 malfunction during the second lunar day.

The data collected by the rover will be sent to the MBRSC. Al-Naimiy, who is president of theAUASS, said it would take months or years to analyse it.

El-Eid hopes that the UAE’s first lunar mission will boost research in the Middle East. The focus should not just be on “spending money to build rovers or spaceships, you have to do some research with the data”, says El-Eid, who is Lebanon’s representative at the AUASS.

ispace hopes to turn a profit as a one- way taxi service to the moon for businesses and organizations. Hakamada said Wednesday that a second mission is already in the works for next year.

Hakuto and Beresheet: an Israeli nonprofit trying to land a commercial lunar rover and toylike robot on the moon

As the landers descended, there was no contact as they traveled around 16 mph. As minutes passed without word from the lander, flight controllers peered at their screens in Tokyo, expressionless.

The United States, Russia, and China are the only three governments to have ever touched down on the moon. An Israeli nonprofit tried to land a craft on the moon in 2019.

The mini lunar rover and toylike robot from Japan were carried on the 7-foot lander. There were items from private customers on the plane.

Named Hakuto, Japanese for white rabbit, the spacecraft had targeted Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the moon’s near side, more than 50 miles (87 kilometers) across and just over 1 mile (2 kilometers) deep.

It took a long, roundabout route to the moon following its December liftoff, beaming back photos of Earth along the way. The lander left the Earth and entered the moon.

Hakuto and the Israeli spacecraft named Beresheet were finalists in the Google Lunar X Prize competition requiring a successful landing on the moon by 2018. The grand prize was not claimed.

The Tokyo-based company Ispace lofted its M1 lander on December 11, 2022. It is expected to reach Atlas crater, on the southeastern edge of Mare Frigoris, at 1:40 am Eastern time Wednesday, which is Japan time. (“Moon time” is not a thing yet.) Adhering the landing would make I space a leading player in the lunar space industry, as many other companies are making their own landers and rovers.

“We are the first commercial lunar lander, and I’m really happy with this,” says Ryo Ujiie, Ispace’s chief technology officer. “The important thing is to complete this mission and learn from it. ”Technically, Ispace isn’t making the first attempt to set down a private craft on the moon. In 2019, the nonprofit Israeli organization SpaceIL sent a privately funded lander called Beresheet, but it crashed, along with a payload that included human DNA samples and thousands of tardigrades, tiny “water bears” that can survive almost anywhere.

The Ispace lander comes equipped with a large, 400-Newton thruster and six additional thrusters, enabling a controlled descent to the surface. Ujiie hopes that the craft will make a soft landing thanks to the thrusters, navigation system, and four landing legs. 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.