JAKARTA - The moon will soon have guests of the landing robot who will ride the SpaceX rocket today, December 1 local time.
The cargo that SpaceX is carrying will be the first private lander on the Moon. Originally scheduled for November 30, but due to an obstacle, now the mission dubbed the Hakuto-R 1 Mission will launch with a Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, United States (US) at 3:37 a.m. EST.
The Hakuto-R 1 mission was made by ispace, a Japanese-based private space company that will carry a Series 1 ispace lunar lander. The robot weighs 340 kilograms and has a payload capacity of 30 kilograms, which could be anything from a remote controlled rover to science equipment.
The lander is also armed with assembled thermal control and its own radiation, propulsion systems with three types of boosters, and altitude adjustment equipment.
When Hakuto-R 1 launches, it will start a journey of nearly four months to the Moon. Once the lander is safe on the lunar surface, he will deploy Rashid, a small rover robot carried by the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The 22-pound four-wheeled Rover will cross the Moon for one lunar day (14 Earth days) while collecting data on the lunar surface.
Rashid is equipped with a high-resolution camera, a thermal and microscopic imaging device, as well as a probe that allows it to study an electric environment on the lunar surface. Scientists believe that this electric charge was created by the solar wind, a flux of charged particles that continues to flow from the Sun.
The mission will be the first for ispace, which has developed Hakuto-R 1 for more than a decade after its establishment in 2010. The company has a planned second Moon mission in 2023, also expected to launch with a Falcon 9 rocket.
Launching Slashgear, besides that, ispace already has a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract, which assigns the company to land vehicles on the far side of the Moon by 2025.
The company has separately signed a deal with NASA to mine as well as deliver lunar regoliths, and is working with the European Space Agency (ESA) to extract water on Earth's natural satellites.
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