HAKUTO-R Mission 1: Landing a Japanese-Made Vehicle on the Moon and Studying the Moon’s Geology
Tomorrow there will be an attempt to land a Japanese-made vehicle on the Moon. If successful, the HAKUTO-R Mission 1 (M1) will be the first commercial mission to accomplish a lunar landing, and be both countries’ first visit to the Moon’s surface.
M1 was launched on 11 December 2022 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and entered lunar orbit on 21 March. The rovers on board will study lunar soil and geology in a previously unexplored location.
Understanding the geology of the moon has always been an interest for the people that have gone there. There is an application for that knowledge. She said that the resources on the moon could be used to make further exploration cheaper and easier.
M1’s ultimate destination is Atlas crater, at the outer edge of the Moon’s Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold). “This is a region that no previous lunar missions have explored,” says Hamid Al-Naimiy, an astrophysicist at the University of Sharjah, UAE.
The JAXA lunar mission: surviving lunar dust with a M1 rover and launching a Solar System observatory
If the pre-landing checks indicate that the craft cannot land as intended, then further attempts will be made on April, 1 May and 3 May.
Ujiie says that the spacecraft will modify its altitude and speed in order to ensure a soft landing. This will be the only use of the sensor in a lunar environment, which carries an “inevitable risk”.
On landing, the craft will have to refill its battery, as well as deploy its two rovers, one of which is built by the Mohammed bin Khalid Space Centre (MBRSC).
While this mission is a technology demonstration, M1 will arrive carrying payloads, including 360-degree cameras from a Canadian company and rovers from the Japanese space agency and the United Arab Emirates.
The rover will look at lunar dust. “Those are very powdery and have sharp edges, like glass, and can affect the equipment of astronauts and their spacesuits over time,” says AlMaeeni. Finding solutions to surviving lunar dust will be a key step in establishing permanent space stations on the Moon, she adds. Material suitability tests will be run by the rover. The experiment will determine suitable materials for hardware in future lunar missions.
JAXA will use a baseball-sized robot to gather data on the Moon’s surface, which could help develop self-driving technology.
Scientists will be able to study the solar system as a result of the data collected by the rover. According to Mounib El-Eid from the American University of Beirut, the moon has a history of the Solar System. The Earth has had plate tectonics, but the Moon has not.
The M1 lander will be switched off once night falls on the Moon, 12–14 Earth days after landing. This will almost certainly mark the end of its mission: neither the M1 lander nor the Rashid rover are equipped to survive the low temperatures during lunar night. The battery will not work during the second lunar day, that is what we are expecting.
The data the rover collects will be sent to the MBRSC. “It will take months or years to analyse it,” says Al-Naimiy, who is president of the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences (AUASS).
El-Eid hopes that the UAE’s first lunar mission will boost research in the Middle East. The focus should not just be on “spending money to build rovers or spaceships, you have to do some research with the data”, says El-Eid, who is Lebanon’s representative at the AUASS.
ispace is planning to launch its 2nd and 3rd Moon missions in the years of 20 and 25. For mission 2, “we are going to carry our own small rover and we can do some more scientific research”, says Ujiie.
Ispace: Landing a Private Lunar Robot on the Moon but it Caught a Non-Public, High-Redshift Spacecraft
Communications ceased as the lander descended the final 33 feet (10 meters), traveling around 16 mph (25 kph). Flight controllers peered at their screens in Tokyo, expressionless, as minutes went by with no word from the lander, which is presumed to have crashed.
The United States, Russia and China are the only governments that have successfully touched down on the moon. An Israeli nonprofit tried to land on the moon in 2019, but its spacecraft was destroyed on impact.
The 7-foot lander (2.3-meter) Japanese lander carried a mini lunar rover for the United Arab Emirates and a toylike robot from Japan designed to roll around in the moon dust. There were items from people who weren’t public.
Named Hakuto, Japanese for white rabbit, the spacecraft had targeted Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the moon’s near side, more than 50 miles (87 kilometers) across and just over 1 mile (2 kilometers) deep.
It took a long, roundabout route to the moon following its December liftoff, beaming back photos of Earth along the way. The lunar landers entered the lunar elliptical zone on March 21.
A successful landing of the Beresheet craft on the moon was required in order to make it to the finals. The grand prize wasn’t claimed.
Ispace lofted its M1 lander in December of 2022. It is expected to reach Atlas Crater on the southeastern side of Mare Frigoris by 1 pm Eastern time on Tuesday and then be in Japan by 1:40 am Wednesday. There isn’t a thing yet named moon time. Sticking the landing would make Ispace a leading player in a nascent lunar aerospace industry, as many companies, mostly based in the US, are planning their own landers, rovers, and payloads.
“We are the first commercial lunar lander, and I’m really happy with this,” says Ryo Ujiie, Ispace’s chief technology officer. “The important thing is to complete this mission and learn from it. ”Technically, Ispace isn’t making the first attempt to set down a private craft on the moon. In 2019, the nonprofit Israeli organization SpaceIL sent a privately funded lander called Beresheet, but it crashed, along with a payload that included human DNA samples and thousands of tardigrades, tiny “water bears” that can survive almost anywhere.
The Ispace landers have a large, 400-Newton thrust and six additional thrusts for a controlled descent to the surface. Ujiie wants the craft to achieve a soft touchdown with the assistance of those thrusters, navigation, and four landing legs. The company chose its landing site so that engineers at mission control in Tokyo will be able to maintain visual contact and communication with the lander.