How UAE's Emirates Lunar Mission is preparing full steam to send Rashid to the moon

Gulf News

Members of the Emirates Lunar Mission (ELM) — or the men and women behind the Rashid rover — are in a race against time. The Arab world’s first mission to the moon was announced in September last year with an initial launch date of 2024, but it was moved two years ahead of schedule.  Read the full story here: https://bit.ly/339uJl7  See more videos at https://gulfnews.com/videos Read more Gulf News stories here: https://bit.ly/2HLJ2km  Subscribe to Gulf News on YouTube and watch more of our videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/GulfNewsTV  #UAEnews #Dubai #moon

Transcript

00:00The Moon is an excellent platform to test new technologies.

00:11The Emirates lunar mission is the first mission by the Emirates to send a robot to the surface of another celestial body

00:20and it will give us the opportunity to develop our capabilities

00:25in developing such technologies for future missions to the lunar surface as well as to Mars.

00:32The mission is unique in terms of the fact that the rover, the Roche rover, will explore a new area

00:39and a new location on the surface of the Moon that was not explored before.

00:44That will give us an opportunity to generate a huge amount of very useful science data

00:50for the international science community to study the lunar surface,

00:55to understand the geography and the physical property of the lunar surface.

01:03The Moon is an excellent platform to test new technologies and to do useful science

01:11since it is our closest neighbor compared to other celestial bodies and compared to Mars.

01:19To develop a mission to the Moon is much more convenient than developing a mission to Mars and other celestial bodies.

01:27So in order to develop our capabilities, it's an excellent opportunity to use the Moon as such a platform.

01:35Now, the Global Exploration Roadmap that was published recently

01:41emphasizes the fact that all international efforts need to be focused on the Moon to develop the Moon as a gateway.

01:50The missions to Mars and other planets should start from the Moon as a gateway

01:56so that we can use the Moon as a base station where we fuel,

02:03where we start our journey to the outer space and to far celestial bodies.

02:10Technologies, especially space technologies, require a long time to be developed.

02:15And to test those technologies requires a lot of effort and a lot of resources and money in order to test those technologies.

02:22So it is easier and more cost-effective and efficient to test those technologies on the surface of the Moon

02:30before making sure that they are ready to be used on missions for Mars and other planets.

02:40So this is why the Immersed Lunar Missions falls under the Mars 2117 program,

02:46which states that UAE has an ambitious plan to build a human settlement on the surface of Mars by 2170.

02:58I'm responsible for the communications subsystem that we have on Roshan.

03:03So my daily task is about making sure that the design of those subsystems work properly.

03:12Also, I'm part of the science team where we make sure that all the science instruments that we have onboard Roshan

03:25can have significant output once we have Roshan onboard.

03:32In general, Roshan will answer many science questions that we have on science,

03:38like the formation of the Moon and the Moon itself as part of the solar system.

03:44It will study the chemical and geology of the lunar sand.

03:53Also, it will study, as Dr. Ahmed mentioned, the electron sheet that we have on top of the lunar surface.

03:59Besides, we will study the thermal environment on the lunar surface.

04:04This has never been done before.

04:06All the inputs or results that we have about the thermal environment were taken from an orbiter.

04:15So this will be the first mission to study the thermal behavior of the rocks and sand from very close areas.

04:24I'm responsible for the ground control system.

04:28So anything related to issuing commands and receiving data from the rover

04:35will be handed by the software that we are designing and developing in Muhammad Rush Space Center.

04:42So the main goal of this system is to command the rover.

04:47Any command will be sent from Emirates Lunar Mission software, control software, to the rover using this system.

04:54And the telemetry that we are going to receive and we will analyze those telemetry

05:01to check the health of the rover based on that software tool.

05:12NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

05:15California Institute of Technology

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