Japanese startup iSpace has said its spacecraft has reached the furthest distance from Earth, adding that despite minor technical hitches during the launch, the spacecraft is on track to land on the moon in late April.
The company's CEO, Takeshi Hakamada, told reporters yesterday, Monday, that the "Hakuto-R Mission 1" lander, which was launched from Florida in December, encountered "several" problems during its journey to the moon, but many of them were overcome and none of them will threaten. The expected landing of the vehicle.
The vehicle, if its mission is successfully completed, will be the first vehicle built by a private company to land on the surface of the moon, according to Reuters. Only the governments of the United States, Russia and China have succeeded in achieving such a feat, as landing attempts by India and a private Israeli company failed in the past few years.
The Hakuto-R Mission 1 is expected to deploy a two-wheeled, baseball-sized probe from the Japanese space agency "JAXA" and the four-wheeled Rashid explorer made by the UAE. The Tokyo-based company celebrated a milestone in January when the spacecraft completed a full month of stable deep space flights.
On January 20, the spacecraft reached its farthest point from Earth, about 13.75 million kilometers away. The company said in a statement that among the problems that the vehicle faced was an unexpected malfunction in the sensor, guidance and navigation system, before finding a way to solve it quickly.
She added that the mission managers had made some adjustments to fix the system, which will help determine the appropriate position in which the vehicle can land on the moon. And "iSpace" contracted with the US Aeronautics and Space Administration "NASA" to transport equipment to the moon. The company aims to build a permanent crewed station on the moon by 2040.
0 Comments