The Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Publication date: December 11, 2022 • 40 min ago • 3 min read Join the discussion
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A Tokyo company aimed for the moon with its own private lander Sunday, launching a SpaceX rocket carrying the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover and a toy-like robot from Japan that it is designed to spin there in the gray dust. It will take nearly five months for the craft and its experiments to reach the moon.
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ispace designed its vessel to use minimal fuel to save money and leave more space for cargo. So it takes a slow, low-energy path to the moon, flying 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth before returning and crossing paths with the moon by the end of April.
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By contrast, NASA’s Orion crew capsule with test dummies took five days to reach the Moon last month. The lunar mission ends Sunday with a Pacific meltdown. The spacecraft will aim for the Atlas Crater on the northeastern part of the moon’s near side, which is more than 50 miles (87 kilometers) in diameter and just over 1 mile (2 kilometers) deep. With its four legs extended, the landing craft stands over 7 feet (2.3 meters) tall. With a science satellite already orbiting Mars, the UAE also wants to explore the moon. His 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 in the mission. In addition, the aircraft 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 Japan-based spark plug company. a flight computer from the company in Ottawa, Ontario with artificial intelligence to identify geological features seen by the UAE rover. and 360-degree cameras from a company in the Toronto area.
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The rocket ride was a small NASA laser experiment now heading alone to the moon to hunt for ice in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar south pole. The space mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for white rabbit. In Asian folklore, a white rabbit is said to live on the moon. A second lunar landing by the private company is planned for 2024 and a third in 2025. Founded in 2010, ispace was among the finalists in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition that called for a successful moon landing by 2018. The space-built lunar rover never launched. Another finalist, an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL, managed to reach the moon in 2019. But instead of landing softly, the Beresheet spacecraft crashed into the moon and was destroyed.
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With Sunday’s pre-dawn launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, ispace is now on track to become one of the first private operators to attempt a moon landing. Although they won’t launch until early next year, the lunar craft built by Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology and Houston’s Intuitive Machines may beat space to the moon thanks to shorter cruise times. Only Russia, the US and China have achieved so-called “soft landings” on the moon, starting with the former Soviet Union’s Luna 9 in 1966. And only the US has put astronauts on the lunar surface: 12 men over six landings. Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the last astronaut landing on the Moon, by Apollo 17’s Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on December 11, 1972.
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NASA’s Apollo moons were all “about the excitement of technology,” said ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada, who was not alive at the time. Now, “it’s the excitement of the business.” “This is the dawn of the lunar economy,” Hakamada noted on SpaceX’s webcast. “Let’s go to the moon.” The liftoff was supposed to have taken place two weeks ago, but was delayed by SpaceX for additional rocket checks. Eight minutes after liftoff, the recycled first-stage booster landed back at Cape Canaveral under a nearly full moon, the twin sonic booms echoing through the night. —— The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Education Media Group. AP is solely responsible for all content.
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