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 kilometres from Earth before looping back and intersecting with the moon by the end of April.
With a science satellite already around Mars, the U.A.E. wants to explore the moon, too. Its rover, named Rashid after Dubai's royal family, weighs just 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. Also flying: a solid state battery from a Japanese-based spark plug company; an Ottawa company's flight computer with artificial intelligence for identifying geologic features seen by the U.A.E. rover; and 360-degree cameras from a Toronto-area company.
Founded in 2010, ispace was among the finalists in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition requiring a successful landing on the moon by 2018. The lunar rover built by ispace never launched. Only Russia, the U.S. and China have achieved so-called "soft landings" on the moon, beginning with the former Soviet Union's Luna 9 in 1966. And only the U.S. has put astronauts on the lunar surface: 12 men over six landings.
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