But instead of landing gently, the spacecraft Beresheet slammed into the moon and was destroyed.ĪLSO READ | SpaceX postpones mission to put Japanese lander on Moon The lunar rover built by ispace never launched.Īnother finalist, an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL, managed to reach the moon in 2019. A second lunar landing by the private company is planned for 2024 and a third in 2025.įounded in 2010, ispace was among the finalists in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition requiring a successful landing on the moon by 2018. In Asian folklore, a white rabbit is said to live on the moon. The ispace mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for white rabbit. Hitching a ride on the rocket is a small NASA laser experiment that will fly to the moon on its own to hunt for ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar south pole. Also flying: a solid-state battery from a Japanese-based spark plug company an Ottawa, Ontario, company’s flight computer with artificial intelligence for identifying geologic features seen by the UAE rover and 360-degree cameras from a Toronto-area company.ĪLSO READ | SpaceX gives rival's internet satellites ride to orbit In addition, the lander is carrying an orange-sized sphere from the Japanese Space Agency that will transform into a wheeled robot on the moon. 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. With a science satellite already around Mars, the UAE wants to explore the moon, too. With its four legs extended, the lander is more than 7 feet (2.3 meters) tall. The ispace lander will aim for Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the moon’s near side, more than 50 miles (87 kilometres) across and just over 1 mile (2 kilometres) deep. The lunar flyby mission ends Sunday with a Pacific splashdown. 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.īy contrast, NASA’s Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the moon last month. The company ispace designed its craft to use minimal fuel, to save money and leave more room for cargo. It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the moon. CAPE CANAVERAL: A Tokyo company aimed for the moon with its own private lander 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 gray dust.
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