UAE’s Rashid Rover successfully carries out the 3rd orbital control manoeuvre

Yamama Bedwan, Staff Reporter

The “Rashid Rover”, on Thursday, carried out the third orbital control maneuver successfully within the mission 1 lunar lander operations at a distance of 1.3 km from the earth, according to ispace.

On Friday, ispace through twitter announced the latest developments of HAKUTO-R Mission 1, saying “Our Ops Team successfully carried out the 3rd orbital control maneuver of our HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lunar lander operations plan! The lander is currently traveling about 1.3 million km from Earth.”

It continued, “In preparation for the most recent maneuver, engineers at our Mission Control Center in Tokyo ran practice simulations. The team continues to check the status of the lander daily and have reported that the lander has maintained stable navigation since launch on Dec. 11th.”

ispace shared an illustration showing the location of the lander 55 days after the launch, which is in light blue, while the yellow color represents the moon’s orbit, and the white dotted line represents the path of free fall towards lunar gravity, which will last a full month. Rashid Rover's landing site will be the Atlas crater at the end of April.