Source: Science and Technology Daily
On July 20 this year, the UAE Mars rover "Hope" was successfully launched, firing its first shot of "fire detection". Now, the UAE has set its sights on the moon.
According to the latest news from the magazine Nature on November 5, the United Arab Emirates announced that it plans to launch a small lunar rover called Rashid to study the moon. The news said that this reflects the ambitious ambitions of Arab countries in spaceflight.
If the plan succeeds, the UAE Space Agency will be the first country in the Arab world and the fifth in the world to successfully send a spacecraft to the lunar surface.
The Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai said its internal team would develop, build and operate the lunar rover, the "Rashid", which weighs about 10 kilograms.
The team will hire a space agency or business partner to perform the most dangerous parts of the lunar mission: launches and landings. Rashid is expected to land on the moon in 2024, and if successful, it will be one of the lunar rovers built by private companies and space agencies.
Building rashid faced multiple challenges
For a country with only 14 years of experience in space exploration, building a lunar rover presents many new challenges for the UAE.
The relatively simple lunar rover contains 6 scientific instruments and 4 cameras. Hannah Sargent, a planetary scientist at The Open University of Milton Keynes in the UK, said: "At this stage, the UAE is not out of control. I think they're actually quite clever in that regard (lunar exploration). ”
Rashid weighs only one-tenth the weight of China's Chang'e-4 probe. The mission it will undertake will include an experiment to study the thermal properties of the lunar surface to further understand the composition of the lunar landscape. Hamad Al Mazuzi, program manager for the MBRSC lunar mission, said another experiment will look at the composition and particle size of lunar dust.
Sargent said the most exciting part of Rashid is that it will be the first time a Longmuir probe has been used on the moon. It will study plasma of charged particles circling the lunar surface caused by a flowing solar wind, an environment that makes lunar dust charged with little is known about.
She added that lunar surface-based experiments are essential to understanding the charged environment, as this condition would allow lunar dust to stick to the surface, potentially posing a danger to future manned spacecraft missions. "Moon dust is really very small, everywhere, sticking together everywhere, if astronauts inhale a lot, it will endanger the body."
Rashid will land in an unexplored location between 45 degrees north latitude or 45 degrees south latitude of the moon's near-equator. This makes it easier to communicate with Earth than far-side probes, and also means that it encounters fewer rocks on landing than in the moon's polar regions. However, the exact location has yet to be selected from the 5 shortlists.
The mission is scheduled to last at least one lunar day — roughly equivalent to 14 days on Earth. Rashid's flight distance can range from a few hundred meters to several kilometers. The team hopes the rover will be able to spend the same long night on the moon, when the temperature will drop to around -173°C. Previous lunar rovers usually carried a heat source, but Adnan Al Rice, a project manager for the UAE's long-term plans, said overnight survival would mean developing new technologies for small lunar rovers.
According to reports, the Rashid is lightweight and can fly with commercial landers, which can reduce the total cost of the mission. Al Mazuzi said the small size and light weight meant that the lunar rover would develop faster and easier to land on the moon.
Although it is planned to be completed independently, international cooperation is still needed
In 2017, the UAE announced a plan called "Mars 2117" to build the first human-habitable community on Mars by 2117. Of course, the plan also includes lunar exploration.
The UAE's space industry started late. The UAE Space Agency is only 6 years old, its satellite programs are only 14 years old, and the country awarded its first doctorate in all fields is only 10 years old. In just over a decade, the UAE has rapidly grown into a country where the space industry is growing by hiring international academic and industrial partners to help establish and design missions while training local engineers.
Although the UAE currently has expertise in satellites, orbiters and remote sensing instruments, robotic missions require new technology – the mechanical structure of the lunar rover and its heating and communication systems. One of the team's project crews, Meheni, said sending signals to Earth from a distance of 384,000 kilometers with the limited power and antenna length of a lightweight lunar rover was particularly challenging.
Mbrsc's rover team, which has been working on the project for about two years, is designing the Rashid lunar rover based on previously successful probes and also plans to build a series of lunar rover models. Al Mazuzi said that unlike the previous MARS probe in the UAE, which was mainly completed in the United States by U.S. and EMI engineers, the entire lunar rover will be developed in the UAE. However, he also said that the construction of Rashid will still involve cooperation among international partners.
Whether Rashid can land on the moon is unknown. So far, only the national space agencies of Europe, China, Russia and the United States have successfully landed the probe safely on the moon, and none of the private companies have succeeded. More than 20 landers have crashed, the most recent failed lunar exploration case was in 2019, when India's Chandrayaan-2 lander crashed on the moon.
Al Rice added: "Although the UAE's 2024 Lunar Exploration mission dates coincide with the US 2024 Artemis lunar landing program, even if the Artemis programme is stopped, the UAE's lunar mission will continue. Our program is completely self-contained. ”
NASA plans to start paying for companies conducting tech experiments on the moon starting in 2021, and in the next few years, a series of lunar rovers and landers will appear as pioneers in implementing the U.S. Artemis lunar landing program. Countries such as the European Space Agency, China, India, Israel, Japan and Russia also plan to launch landers or lunar rovers within the next 5 years.
"Everyone is rushing to the moon, and we want to be a key contributor to these international efforts." Al Mazuzi said.