On Wednesday, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Rashid Rover, the first Emirati mission to the moon.
The four-wheeled rover has completed its final integration with the launch vehicle, the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, which will launch from a spaceport at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:39 pm UAE time. Residents of the UAE will be able to view the launch online, as SpaceX will stream it live. It is the UAE’s first Moon expedition, with further rovers planned for the future. The Rashid rover, developed by Emirati experts from the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC), will be launched to undiscovered parts of the Moon.
The 10-kilogram robotic explorer will transmit back pictures and data on the lunar surface’s dust and soil as part of the Emirates Lunar Mission. The rover has undergone extensive internal and environmental testing over the course of the previous five months. The second stage was a battery of experiments conducted on the Rashid rover at Toulouse, France.
Specifically, there were two parts to this assessment: The first was the Rover’s final round of thermal and vacuum testing at the Airbus facility, where it was subjected to temperatures and pressures meant to replicate those it would experience in space and on the Moon. The CNES Labs performed exhaustive vibration and stress tests on the flying model as part of the environmental testing phase two. To achieve this, the rover was shaken on a vibration table to replicate the conditions it would face during the launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and while decelerating through the lunar atmosphere and the strong impact of deployment and touchdown.
The final phase of the testing campaign, which ensured the rover’s smooth arrival on the lunar surface, was completed in Germany at the space lander’s interfaces. After the environmental testing was complete, this stage featured a final functional test of the integrated system and instrument alignment checks. The mission’s main objective is to investigate lunar plasma in order to answer questions concerning lunar dust, the lunar surface, mobility on the lunar surface, and the interaction of lunar particles with various surfaces.
newsines365 will keep you updated on this after its launch.
by newslines365.com
