With Sunday’s predawn launch, ispace is now on its way to becoming one of the first private entities to attempt a moon landing. It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the moon.
“:”A Tokyo company aimed for the moon with its own private spacecraft on Sunday, blasting off atop a SpaceX rocket with the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover and a toylike robot from Japan that’s designed to roll around up there in the grey dust. It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the moon. The company ispace designed its craft to use minimal fuel, to save money and leave more room for cargo. So it’s taking a slow, low-energy path to the moon, flying 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth before looping back and intersecting with the moon by the end of April. By contrast, Nasa’s Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the moon last month. The lunar fly-by mission ends on Sunday with a Pacific splashdown. The ispace lander will aim for Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the moon’s near side, more than 50 miles (87km) across and just over 1 mile (2km) deep. With its four legs extended, the lander is more than 7 feet (2.3 metres) tall. With a science satellite already around Mars, the UAE wants to explore the moon, too. Its rover, named Rashid after Dubai’s royal family, weighs just 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and will operate on the surface for about 10 days, like everything else on the mission.
