A Japanese lunar lander with a United Arab Emirates-built rover will try to make contact with the moon's surface in the next 24 hours. If successful, this would be the first commercially made spacecraft to set foot on the moon.
On December 11, the lander was carried into space by a SpaceX rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Since then, a low-energy trajectory has taken it on a three-month journey to reach the moon, which is located approximately 239,000 miles (383,000 km) from Earth.
The spaceship travelled around 870,000 miles (1.4 million km) into space overall throughout the journey.
Touchdown is expected to occur Tuesday at 12:40pm Eastern Time, which is Wednesday at 17:40 British Summer Time.
The Rashid rover, the first lunar spacecraft made by an Arab nation, is being carried by the Hakuto-R lunar lander, which was created by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Only the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China have ever successfully conducted a controlled landing on the moon. The US is still the only nation to have sent people to the moon.
In contrast to earlier lunar missions, the Hakuto-R lander was developed by the Japanese corporation ispace, which is trying to land its spacecraft on the moon as a for-profit company rather than under the flag of a single nation.
How to watch the landing
Ispace is broadcasting the HAKUTO-R mission live on the company’s official YouTube channel.
On Tuesday, viewers heard from various people involved, discussing the preparations for the mission and other aspects.
What will the lander do next?
If everything goes well, the Rashid rover, weighing 22 pounds (10 kg), will leave the lunar lander and spend "most of the 14-day lunar daytime exploring the Atlas Crater on the northeast of the Moon," according to the European Space Agency, which helped develop the rover's wheels.
Japan's ispace had competed in the the Google Lunar XPrize, which promised a $20 million (£16 million) prize to the firm that could land a robotic rover on the moon, traverse a few thousand feet, and send data back to Earth.
The Google-sponsored competition was abandoned in 2018, but ispace was one of the businesses who choose to keep working on the project.
Future plans for ispace include a mission to collect lunar soil samples for NASA; the Artemis programme uses commercial lunar landers to examine the lunar surface.
