🌕 Japan's ispace mission is called Hakuto, Japanese for white rabbit. In Asian folklore, a white rabbit is said to live on the moon:
It will take nearly five months for the lander and its experiments to reach the moon.
The company ispace designed its craft to use minimal fuel, to save money and leave more room for cargo. So it’s taking a slow, low-energy path to the moon, flying 1 million miles from Earth before looping back and intersecting with the moon by the end of April.with test dummies took five days to reach the moon last month. The lunar flyby mission ends Sunday with a Pacific splashdown.Sign up for NBC Philadelphia newsletters.
The ispace lander will aim for Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the moon’s near side, more than 50 miles across and just over 1 mile deep. With its four legs extended, the lander is more than 7 feet tall. With a science satellite already around Mars, the UAE wants to explore the moon, too. Its rover, named Rashid after Dubai’s royal family, weighs just 22 pounds and will operate on the surface for about 10 days, like everything else on the mission.
In addition, the lander is carrying an orange-sized sphere from the Japanese Space Agency that will transform into a wheeled robot on the moon. Also flying: a solid state battery from a Japanese-based spark plug company; an Ottawa, Ontario, company’s flight computer with artificial intelligence for identifying geologic features seen by the UAE rover; and 360-degree cameras from a Toronto-area company.
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