Japanese company's lander rockets toward moon with UAE rover
  • last year
Japanese company's lander rockets toward moon with UAE rover

A Tokyo company aimed for the moon with its own private lander 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. 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 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before looping back and intersecting with the moon by the end of April.

The ispace lander will aim for Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the moon’s near side, more than 87 kilometers across and just over 2 kilometers deep.

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.

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.

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