MONITORING DESK
CALIFORNIA: The Japanese Lander Mission — a mission to launch the first private Japanese-built Moon lander by SpaceX — has been postponed by one day on Wednesday.
SpaceX Postponed
The current launch time for a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida is Thursday at 3:37 a.m. (0837 GMT). More pre-flight inspections were being performed, according to a tweet from SpaceX.
Only the US spacex, Russia, and China have succeeded in landing a robot on the moon’s surface thus far.
The Hakuto-R program’s inaugural mission is being carried out by the Japanese company ispace.
Lander mission
A company statement predicted that the lander would land in the Atlas crater on the visible side of the Moon sometime in April 2023.
It has a 10-kilogram rover named Rashid that was built by the United Arab Emirates and measures just over 2 by 2.5 metres. The oil-rich nation is a relative newcomer to the space race but already boasts recent achievements, such as a Mars probe in 2020. Rashid, if it is successful, will be the first Moon mission from the Arab world.
In the six short years since we first started conceptualizing this project in 2016, we have accomplished so much, according to ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada. Hakuto was one of five finalists in the global Google Lunar XPrize competition, an attempt to send a rover to the Moon by the year 2018 deadline. While others are still in progress.
Another finalist, from the Israeli group SpaceIL, crashed into the ground while attempting to land and was unable to succeed in becoming the first privately-funded mission to accomplish the feat in April 2019.
By offering frequent, affordable transportation to the Moon, ispace, which only has 200 employees, “aims to extend the sphere of human life into space and create a sustainable world.”
The Artemis programme run by NASA is expected to benefit from upcoming missions. An unmanned test flight to the Moon called Artemis-1 is currently in progress. By constructing a space station in lunar orbit and a base on its surface, the US space agency hopes to advance the lunar economy in the ensuing years.
It has given contracts to a number of businesses to create landers that will bring scientific research to the surface. Among them, the American firms Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines should launch in 2023 and, if they take a more direct route, may beat ispace to their destination.
