If all goes well, the motorized machine should begin its mission this Tuesday, with one objective: to better understand the composition of the lunar soil.
He’s going to roll on the moon. At the end of a descent of about an hour from lunar orbit, Rashid, a small “rover” or “astromobile” of 10 kilos and 50 centimeters on a side, must begin its mission, this Tuesday, April 25 in the heart of the huge Atlas crater, a hitherto unexplored area of the Earth’s natural satellite. The vehicle, the result of an international collaboration led by the United Arab Emirates, is a first for the young Emirati space agency and a feat achieved so far only by three countries, the United States, Russia and China.
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Once released on the ground by the lander which has protected it since its launch last December, the vehicle equipped with four notched wheels and solar panels on its sides will deploy its mast at the top of which is one of the three cameras developed by the CNES.
Extreme conditions
Cédric Virmontois, project manager for the French space agency, follows this arrival from the control center in Dubai with a certain nervousness. “We therefore provided three cameras, including two very wide-field cameras. Installed at the front and at the rear, they will allow the rover to be navigated. The third camera has a microscope lens that allows analysis with pixel resolutions below 100 microns”says the specialist.
Another challenge for these cameras is operation in extreme conditions. “The temperature will be very negative at the start, we can go down to -40 degrees on the camera, as for the heat peak on the Moon, we will go up to 85 degrees”, specifies Cédric Virmontois.
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A lifetime of one lunar day
With these “eyes”, which will provide color images, supplemented by the other on-board instruments, the rover will be able to analyze its immediate environment and this lunar soil that scientists call regolith, which it will cover for a few hundred meters in all. .
“It’s really very different from what you can see on Earth, explains Sylvain Breton, associate researcher at the CRPG, a specialized research center at the University of Lorraine. It’s a lot of dust, a lot of pebbles of different sizes. And the objective of this mission is above all to characterize this regolith, both its composition, but also the size of the grains inside.”
The mission of the rover must last one lunar day, the equivalent of fourteen terrestrial days, before the night does not come to extinguish its instruments, undoubtedly definitively.