The United Arab Emirates has announced that it will launch the first Arab moon rover in 2024.
A lunar rover by Nasa. (Representative image (Credit: nasa.gov))
The United Arab Emirates is set to launch the first Arab Moon mission in 2024. The lunar rover named Rashid- named after the late Sheikh Rashid to honour his vision to develop Dubai. It will be the first lunar rover of the Arab world.
The oil-rich United Arab Emirates has built a nuclear power programme, sent a man to space, has a spacecraft currently trekking on Mars, will join an elite club by launching a lunar rover on the Moon.
UAE’s Mars mission called Hope blasted off on July 20 this year aboard a rocket from Japan.
The Moon mission will carry a number of scientific instruments including two cameras or high-resolution optical imagers.
“There are many scientific objectives behind this mission that will help us to better understand the moon,” Adnan AlRais of the UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) told Space.com, “but also in the long run to support our ultimate goal, sending humans to Mars and building settlements on Mars.”
As per a report in Space.com, AlRais heads up the agency’s Mars 2117 program, which was established in 2017 to target landing humans on Mars within a century. As part of the program, the UAE is developing a “Mars Science City” in the desert and taking part in practice Red Planet missions at analog facilities, among other activities.
Meanwhile, the nation’s astronaut program is selecting two new spaceflyers to double its ranks. The UAE currently has two astronauts, one of whom spent a week on the International Space Station in 2019, and recently sent them to NASA’s Johnson Space Center for additional training.
And that’s all going on while the UAE prepares for the Hope spacecraft’s orbital arrival at Mars in February.
For a space program less than two decades old, the newly announced lunar mission marks a foray beyond the existing focus areas of Earth-observation satellites, human spaceflight and Mars exploration.