Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai, said on Wednesday that Abu Dhabi would not stop in its aspiration to explore the surface of the Moon, so the country immediately starts building a new lunar rover after losing the first planetary rover during the failed landing on the Moon
DOHA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th April, 2023) Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai, said on Wednesday that Abu Dhabi would not stop in its aspiration to explore the surface of the Moon, so the country immediately starts building a new lunar rover after losing the first planetary rover during the failed landing on the Moon.
Japanese private space company ispace said earlier on Wednesday that the HAKUTO-R lander, carrying UAE-made lunar rover Rashid, was likely to have "made a hard landing" on the Moon's surface. The lander was some 33 feet above the Moon's surface and was due to land in a few minutes when communication with it was lost. The company's specialists were never able to establish communications with the lander.
"The mission of the spacecraft carrying the Rashid exploration module has failed to land on the surface of the Moon. However, we managed to raise the ceiling of our ambitions to the Moon and create a team of young men and women capable of managing promising space projects ... Today, the work on the new Rashid 2 lunar rover will begin to make a new attempt to reach the Moon," the official said on Twitter.
The vice president added that the UAE succeeded in building a space sector from scratch within ten years.
The Rashid lunar rover weighed 22 pounds and was launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in December 2022. It was expected to land on the northeastern part of the visible side of the moon near the so-called Lake of Dreams, which had not been explored before, and take pictures and conduct research for ten days.
