The Emirati rover Rashid will land on the Moon for an ephemeral mission

The Hakuto-R mission is scheduled to land on the Moon on April 25. This mission is a great first in several respects. The first Emirati rover – a mobile exploration robot – named Rashid, is to land on a Japanese lander made by private company Ispace, which was launched to the Moon on December 11, 2022 using a Falcon rocket 9 from SpaceX.

This mission is therefore a new example of the public-private partnership that is at the heart of the modern philosophy of space missions, the “New Space”. Through Hakuto-R, it is also a nation which thus affirms its presence in space, the United Arab Emirates.

If successful, this mission would be the first in which a private company lands on a celestial body. Only agencies like NASA, the Russian space agency Roscosmos or the Chinese space agency CNSA have landed on the Moon and Mars.

The scientific challenge is also major. Rashid will evolve on the surface of the Moon, in the Atlas crater, with many instruments allowing an extremely precise geological and mineralogical analysis. Finally, the Hakuto-R lander will also drop on the lunar surface Sora-Q, a small oval transforming robot weighing 250 grams and 8 centimeters long, which has a camera and can move with extremities that can be used as wheels.

The UAE already has a fairly strong presence in space and a strong space industry. Their flagship Mars-orbiting mission – named Hope – arrived around the Red Planet at the same time as the much-publicized US Mars2020 mission – which landed the Perseverance rover – and China’s Tianwen-1 mission. Hope remained in orbit around the planet Mars, where she studies its atmosphere and how oxygen and hydrogen escape into space.

The Emirati space policy covers the next hundred years, unlike those of other countries which envisage much shorter time scales – around twenty years for NASA’s Artemis program.

On the Moon side, the Emirates are preparing to land on the moon thanks to an exemplary collaboration from “New Space”. Their Rashid rover, developed at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center, is 70 centimeters high – mast extended – and 50 centimeters wide and contains several scientific instruments.

Three Caspex cameras, developed in France, allowing to obtain high resolution images (full HD), will image the texture of the lunar soil – the “regolith”. One of them is equipped with a microscope of less than 100 micrometers of resolution and the three cameras will see the ground in color, in the visible wavelengths. They will provide the first bricks of spectral information at a distance of just one meter – previous ground-based images taken by Apollo missions were black and white.

This phenomenon, called “static detachment”, has affected the Apollo missions because lunar dust seeps everywhere. “Langmuir probes” – or electrostatic probes – will therefore measure the electron density of the plasma, which causes the dust to separate.

Finally, polymers are attached to the wheels of the rover. The lunar regolith must adhere to these “tires”, which will allow it to be analyzed in more detail with the cameras.

Rashid’s mission is an ephemeral mission. Indeed, a lunar day lasts fourteen Earth days, followed by fourteen days during which it is night. It is uncertain whether the instruments will “wake up” after being deprived of solar power for two of our Earth weeks.

The mission is coordinated on the ground by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center, from where scientists, notably French, will work with engineers to select the geological terrains to be studied. For its part, the Center National d’Etudes Spatiales (Cnes) operations center in Toulouse set up a “ground segment” for the mission to process images from the rover, allowing image quality experts to calibrate images to provide optimized data to the scientific community.

To qualify the Cmos technology in a space environment, many years of testing were necessary. One by one, the steps are validated and the Cmos image sensors are essential for future space missions. In 2014, scientists were convinced and supported Cnes in the production of generic and highly integrated cameras using these image sensors. In less than three years, a new generation of cameras is born, from the prototype to the flight model. This is the birth of Caspex.

This camera equips the optical instrument of Cnes’ first nanosatellite, Eyesat, launched at the end of 2019. The SuperCam instrument of NASA’s Persevrance rover is also equipped with a Caspex camera based on Cmos sensors. And with Rashid, Caspex could soon be the first French camera to take high resolution images on the Moon.

Around 2024, the Franco-German-Japanese MMX mission will leave to try to land on one of Mars’ moons, Phobos. Its rover will be equipped with four Caspex cameras, two cameras for navigation by stereovision and two others for scanning the ground.

Finally, multispectral versions – with 9 and 25 color channels – will equip the future Rashid2 rover, which should go to the Moon in 2025. A new version of Caspex, with a 4K sensor, is also under development and an infrared version Caspex will even see the light of day in 2023 to equip future space missions.

*Cédric Virmontois, engineer in physics and holder of a doctorate in Microelectronics, is responsible for the Image Sensors Department at the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes), in Toulouse.