The team of the first lunar mission of the UAE announced that the assembly of the prototype of the Rashid lunar rover and its functional tests in laboratory conditions have been completed. It is expected that it will go into space in the second half of 2022 and land in the Lake of Dreams — the lunar sea on the visible side of the Moon, according to the tweet of the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center.
The United Arab Emirates ' space program is very young: the first DubaiSat-1 spacecraft was launched in 2009, and the first UAE astronaut arrived on the ISS three years ago [...] . Last year [...], the UAE's first interplanetary station Al Amal went to Mars, which explores the planet's atmosphere.
Last fall, the UAE announced that it would create its first lunar rover, dubbed "Rashid", as part of the Emirates Lunar Mission . It will be a four-wheeled planetoid, with a total mass of 10 kilograms, powered by solar panels. The rover's scientific equipment will include cameras, a thermal imager, a microscope and a Langmuir probe.
Image source: MBRSC
On August 19, 2021, the mission team announced that it had completed the assembly of the prototype of the lunar rover and its functional tests in laboratory conditions. Now the rover must pass tests under conditions close to those of space and those that await it on the surface of the Moon. In addition, the project manager Hamad Al Marzooqi (Hamad Al Marzooqi) said that the main landing site of the rover was chosen by the Lake of Dreams (Lacus Somniorum), which is a lunar sea on the visible side of the Moon, which is formed by basalt lava flows that give it a reddish hue.
Currently, the launch window of the lunar rover is scheduled for August-December 2022, the rover will be delivered to the Moon using the Hakuto-R lander of the Japanese startup ispace. The estimated lifetime of the device will be one lunar day.
Image source: MBRSC
Earlier, we talked about how the Al Amal station looked at discrete auroras on Mars and saw its hydrogen corona .
Alexander Voityuk
