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A Japanese company is advancing plans to launch a special lunar lander by the end of 2022, a year filled with other lunar ambitions and rehearsals that could predict how quickly humans will return to the lunar surface.
If plans hold, the Tokyo-based company, ispace, would make the first solid landing of a Japanese spacecraft on the moon. And when it does, it may find other new visitors this year from Russia and the United States who are starting to explore the moon’s regolith. (Yutu-2, a Chinese rovercurrently the only robotic mission on the moon.)
Other missions in 2022 are planned to orbit the moon, notably the NASA Artemis-1 mission, a major uncrewed test of American hardware to transport astronauts back to the moon. South Korea could also launch its first lunar orbiter later this year.
But other countries hoping to reach the moon by 2022 have lagged behind. India was planning to make its second robotic moon landing attempt this year. However, the Chandrayaan-3 mission was delayed to mid-2023, said K. Sivan, completing his term as head of the nation’s space agency this month. Russia, on the other hand, maintains its confidence. Luna-25 lander to take off this summer.
Built by ispace, the M1 lunar lander is the size of a small whirlpool. It is in the final stages of assembly at Ariane Group’s German facilities, the European partner of the company that recently made the rocket. Launches the James Webb Space Telescope.
If structural tests go as planned in April, the M1 will be sent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to launch one of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
“As of today, the specific launch date is scheduled to be late 2022 at the earliest,” Takeshi Hakamada, founder and CEO of ispace, said at a press conference in Japan on Tuesday.
The moon landing would occur three to four months later, as the M1 lander uses a long lunar orbit to conserve fuel and maximize the amount of cargo the lander can carry.
A few years ago, ispace was a finalist Google Lunar X Prize — a contest ending in 2018 The $20 million prize designed to promote special lunar missions had no winners. Although it did not win the Google award, the company Over $90 million in 2017 and it does a healthy job of carrying payloads to the lunar surface for governments, research institutions and private companies in the future.
The ambitious timeline envisions more than 10 lunar landings in the coming years, among a number of space firms that envision robotically extracting the moon for valuable resources like iron and silicon that can be returned to Earth or used to expand structures on the lunar surface.
Customers for ispace’s first moon landing include Japan’s space agency JAXA, which aims to test a small shape-shifting rover for varying terrains, and the United Arab Emirates’ space program, which sent the first lunar rover quad. Wheeled robot named Rashid.
Nations and private companies have set their sights on the moon in recent years for its potential to serve as a staging area for spacecraft and other technologies that could be used for future Mars missions. The Artemis program relies heavily on private companies to reduce the cost of going to the moon and hopes to stimulate a commercial market for various lunar services.
While ispace’s M1 mission is primarily aimed at demonstrating operations on the moon, the company’s next mission, the M2, will carry its own “micro rover” built to navigate the surface and survey the lunar terrain. Hideki Shimomura, ispace’s chief technology officer, said this task has been delayed from 2023 to 2024 to accommodate engineering program changes and customers’ timelines.
Both American companies are targeting the month before the end of the year; Astrobotic is a space robotics firm in Pittsburgh and Intuitive Machines of Houston. Both firms are building their spacecraft with support from Commercial Lunar Payload Services, a NASA program that aims to help fund the development of privately owned landers that can send probes to the lunar surface.
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