On April 14, mission team members announced that the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) and the Japanese space company, ispace, will collaborate to land the U.A.E.’s robotic Moon rover, Rashid, on the surface of the Moon in 2022, via ispace’s HAKUTO-R lander.
This will be the first Moon landing for the Arab world and for Japan. Only three nations so far have landed on the Moon—the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China.
Like the naming of the Hope orbiter, the name of this 22-lb. Moon rover is important: the name Rashid in Arabic means (loosely translated) “rightly guided", and Rāshid is one of the 99 names of God in the Quran. It will land near the equator on the near side of the Moon, but the exact landing site has not yet been announced.
According to Space.com, “The little four-wheeled rover will study its surroundings for at least one lunar day, or about 14 Earth days, using a high-resolution camera, a thermal imager, a microscopic imager and a Langmuir probe. This latter instrument could help scientists better understand the electrically charged environment at the lunar surface, which is apparently caused by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing constantly from the Sun.”
