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The vehicle will be another regional first – and it’s smaller than any moon-landing rover.
To date, the 310 pound (140 kilogram) Chinese Yutu rovers are the lightest to have made lunar landings, in 2013 and 2019. But the United Arab Emirates will weigh less than a tenth. About 20 inches (50 centimeters) long and wide and 28 inches (70 centimeters) high, it will weigh around 22 pounds (10 kilograms) with its payload.
Scheduled to launch in 2024, the Emirates lunar mission aims to travel to a part of the moon that has never been reached by a rover. The exact landing site has not yet been revealed, but the goal is to gain a better understanding of how lunar dust and rocks vary across the moon.
“If you think of the world and say you’ve visited 10 places, you can’t say you know the whole Earth – so it’s the same with the moon,” says Sara Al Maeeni, scientist for Mohammed Bin’s project. Rashid. Dubai Space Center. “We expect to see new things on the new site, (and) understand more about airless bodies.”
Airless bodies are space objects without an atmosphere, such as the moon, asteroids, and the planet Mercury. Without an atmosphere to protect them, their surfaces are constantly modified and altered by solar radiation, meteorites and dust.
The team hopes to take a close look at the moon’s floor, record its temperature, analyze how moon dust adheres to different surfaces, and study the impact of solar radiation.
Named Rashid, in honor of the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, former ruler of Dubai, the rover will carry six scientific instruments on board, as well as communication, power and movement systems.
Keeping the collective weight of the equipment under 22 pounds is a challenge in itself, says Al Maeeni, but building such a small rover creates other obstacles.
Big challenges for small rovers
The temperature on the moon varies considerably between day and night. According to Al Maeeni. Small vehicles are more affected by external temperature changes.
“For small rovers to survive a full cycle of day and night, I would say it’s very difficult,” says Armin Wedler, a planetary exploration researcher at the German Aerospace Center. “The mobile cools down to room temperature and heating up again could damage your system.”
The Rashid rover should only operate for a single lunar day – equivalent to 14 days on Earth – avoiding the cold of the lunar night, so it does not need to go through the warm-up phase.
However, as previous lunar missions have done, the team will attempt to wake the rover the next day, to test whether its systems have survived the low temperatures. “It won’t work completely, we’re just looking for any type of response … even if it’s just a beep,” says Al Maeeni.
Another challenge is to generate, store and distribute enough energy for all systems to function, given the limited space for solar panels and batteries. This means maximizing energy efficiency.
“For example, the communication system weighs around 400 grams in total and only uses 4 to 5 watts,” says Al Maeeni. “So establishing a signal this far from Earth, nearly 385,000 km (away), is truly amazing.”
Rovers smaller than Rashid are in development, but none have yet made the trip to the moon. The 4.5-pound (2-kilogram) “Iris” is being built by students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania in conjunction with NASA. We hope to embark on a private lunar mission this year.
Despite the constraints, building a small rover has its advantages.
Make space more accessible
“Any transport to the moon, of course, will require a lot of fuel and it’s expensive,” says Al Maeeni, but small rovers are “much more profitable”.
And small rovers are likely to cause less damage to the moon’s surface when landing. A large impact could spread moon dust all around the moon, due to the low gravity, which could contaminate the samples, says Laura Forczyk, owner of US space consulting firm Astralytical.
“The smaller the lander, the less likely it is to do that kind of damage, or the easier it is to contain the dust once you land,” she adds.
In the future, smaller rovers could also make the space more accessible to other countries.
“We’re going to see more and more countries that have never done missions like this before they can launch these missions,” says Forczyk. “Their budgets could be more limited, so there will be smaller rovers,” but the research will still deepen scientific knowledge, she says.
But in addition to the practical aspects, for Al Maeeni, it is about proving what is possible.
“We took on that challenge and came up with Rashid – and that’s already an achievement,” she says.
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