Rashid Rover 1.3m km away from earth
Dubai: The “Rashid Rover”, on Thursday, carried out the third orbital control manoeuvre successfully within the mission 1 lunar lander operations at a distance of 1.3 million kilometres from the earth, according to ispace.
On Friday, ispace through twiter announced the latest developments of HAKUTO-R Mission 1, saying “Our Ops Team successfully carried out the 3rd orbital control manoeuvre of our HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lunar lander operations plan! The lander is currently traveling about 1.3 million km from Earth.”
It continued, “In preparation for the most recent manoeuvre, engineers at our Mission Control Center in Tokyo ran practice simulations. The team continues to check the status of the lander daily and have reported that the lander has maintained stable navigation since launch on Dec. 11th.”
ispace shared an illustration showing the location of the lander 55 days ater the launch, which is in light blue, while the yellow color represents the moon’s orbit, and the white doted line represents the path of free fall towards lunar gravity, which will last a full month. Rashid Rover’s landing site will be the Atlas crater at the end of April.
The Rashid Rover successfully completed one month in space, travelling close to 1.34 million km, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced on January 13.
The first Arab-built lunar rover designed and built in the UAE by a 100 percent Emirati team of engineers, experts, and researchers, lited off on 11th December 2022 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Since the launch, the Emirates Lunar Mission (ELM) team has completed 220 minutes of communication with the world’s most compact rover. The team has completed all scheduled health assessment and maintenance checks of the rover and its onboard subsystems and instruments. For two weeks ater the launch, the rover was powered on for 10 minutes daily, and the team on Earth is now communicating with it once every week.
During the ongoing four-month cruise phase, the team will communicate with the Rashid Rover for another 150 minutes. The ELM team also noted that the Rashid Rover’s subsystems had been activated 17 times since launch. The subsystems were powered on for one hour the first time, followed by 10 minutes of daily activation over the subsequent two weeks. Currently, the rover’s subsystems are being powered on once every week for 10 minutes.