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The United Arab Emirates has joined the list of nations seeking to visit Moon, with a lunar rover named Rashid scheduled to launch in 2024.
The announcement comes as the nation’s first mission beyond Earth orbit, a Mars spaceship named Hope, is still traveling to the Red Planet. That mission is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying how the climate and atmosphere of Mars work from orbit. The new lunar mission has a different flavor, focusing more on developing technologies and assessing concerns before the longer, manned exploration missions leave Earth and land on other worlds.
“There are many scientific goals behind this mission that will help us better understand the moon,” Adnan AlRais of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC) in the United Arab Emirates told Space.com, “but also in the long term to support our ultimate goal, sending humans to Mars and building settlements on Mars. “
Related: The Hope Mars mission of the United Arab Emirates in photos
AlRais runs the agency’s Mars 2117 program, which was established in 2017 to target the landing of humans on Mars within a century. As part of the program, the UAE is developing a “Mars Science City” in the desert and participating in practice red planet missions in analog installations, among other activities.
Meanwhile, the nation’s astronaut program is selecting two new space fliers to double its ranks. The UAE currently has two astronauts, one of whom spent a week on the International Space Station in 2019, and recently sent them to NASA’s Johnson Space Center for additional training.
And all of that is happening as the UAE prepares for the orbital arrival of the Hope spacecraft to Mars in February.
For a space program less than two decades old, the recently announced lunar mission marks a foray beyond the existing focus areas of Earth-observing satellites, manned spaceflight, and exploration of Mars.
Why go to the moon?
The decision to target a lunar rover stems from international recognition of the moon as a stepping stone to Mars, a nearby world to test technologies before committing to the month-long trip to the red planet.
“It makes sense to go to the moon,” Hamad Al Marzooqi, project manager for the new lunar mission, told Space.com. “The moon is closer to Earth than Mars and will allow us to carry out high-frequency missions,” although he declined to give details on what kind of future missions the agency is considering.
The team’s current focus, he said, is on this initial lunar rover, dubbed Rashid in honor of the late Sheik Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the father of the current sheikh and one of the founders of the United Arab Emirates, according to the Associated Press. The United Arab Emirates has yet to select the rocket the rover will launch in 2024.
The team must also select a landing site among the five finalists, Al Marzooqi said. Those candidate sites, all located in the equatorial region on the near side of the moon, are places that have never been visited by landed spacecraft, he added.
“We plan to go and explore new areas that have not been explored during previous missions and that will allow us to do interesting science,” said Al Marzooqi.
The four-wheeled rover’s to-do list is something of a smorgasbord, determined more by the landing site and the instruments the team thinks it can handle than by a general scientific narrative. Rashid will carry a high-resolution camera, a thermal imaging camera and a microscope camera to inform scientists about the dusty lunar regolith (lunar land) and the surroundings of the probe.
It will also carry a Langmuir probe, an instrument that will study a particularly strange phenomenon on the moon. The solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles flowing from the sun, continually bombards the lunar surface from the daytime side, since the moon has no atmosphere to stop these particles. The result is a slight positive charge on the day-side surface and, in turn, a Negatively charged photoelectron sheath about 3 feet (1 meter) tall above him.
The phenomenon can contribute to the rigidity of moondust That so frustrated the Apollo-era exploration, a potential concern already on the minds of those seeking to return to the moon. Al Marzooqi said that no Langmuir probe has reached the lunar surface and he hopes that Rashid’s will address this ongoing mystery.
The rover will also test experimental space suit materials to assess how they withstand the harsh lunar environment. And although Rashid’s main mission will last only one lunar day (about 14 Earth days), the rover will carry experimental software that will monitor the temperatures of the instruments and regulate their power, with the aim of waking them up again once the frigid night is over. lunar. Al Marzooqi said.
Related: Hazzaa AlMansoori: Emirati astronaut’s first space mission in photos
To date, three nations have successfully landed on the moon: the then Soviet Union, the US, and China. Two countries tried to join that list last year, but failed: both Israel Beresheet lander and the Vikram lander of India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission experienced failures during the landing process and did not slow down enough to survive the impact.
Al Marzooqi said those missions were on the Rashid team’s mind ahead of a landing attempt in 2024.
“I was disappointed to see those failed missions,” he said. “When you see failed missions before your mission, you have to better understand the risk to make sure we don’t go the same way.”
But that risk is also the price of admission, the UAE knows.
“There is no space mission with a 100% success rate,” Al Marzooqi said.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
