The UAE's tiny lunar rover will face big challenges on the moon

Last month, the United Arab Emirates became the first country in the Arab world to put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars. But as it celebrates the achievement of its Hope probe, a group of Emirati scientists is already engaged in another historic feat: building a lunar rover.

31-03-2021 05:00

The vehicle will be another regional first -- and it is smaller than any rover to have landed on the moon.

To date, China's 310-pound (140-kilogram) Yutu rovers are the lightest to have made lunar landings, in 2013 and 2019. But the UAE's will weigh less than a tenth of that. Around 21 inches (54 centimeters) long and wide, and and 3.3 inches (8.5 centimeters) tall, it will weigh approximately 22 pounds (10 kilograms) with its payload.

Set to launch in 2024, the Emirates Lunar Mission aims to travel to a part of the moon that has never been reached by a rover. The exact landing site has not yet been revealed, but the objective is to better understand how lunar dust and rocks vary across the moon.

"If you think about the world and say that you visited 10 places, you can't say that you know the entire Earth -- so it's the same with the moon," says Sara Al Maeeni, a project scientist from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai. "We're expecting to see new things at the new site, (and) understand more about airless bodies."

The US, Russia and China are the only countries to have successfully landed a spacecraft on the lunar surface. In 2019, India's Chandrayaan-2 mission crash-landed there. Here you can see its rover on a ramp moving into the main vehicle, before launch.

Airless bodies are space objects that lack an atmosphere, such as the moon, asteroids, and the planet Mercury. Without an atmosphere to protect them, their surfaces are constantly changed and weathered by solar radiation, meteoroids and dust.

The team hopes to closely examine the moon's soil, recording its temperature, analyzing how lunar dust clings to different surfaces, and looking at the impact of solar radiation.

Named Rashid, in honor of the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, former ruler of Dubai, the rover will carry six scientific instruments onboard, plus systems for communications, power and movement.

Keeping the collective weight of the equipment under 22 pounds is a challenge in itself, says Al Maeeni, but building such a small rover creates other obstacles.