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VIDEO – The Falcon 9 rocket took off last night from Cape Canaveral towards the Moon. On board, an American probe and another Japanese one built by private companies.
Moon objective for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. This Wednesday at 1:11 a.m. local time (06:11 GMT), NASA carried out a new launch of Elon Musk’s reusable rocket. A special feature of this lunar mission is the presence on board the craft of two probes from private companies.
The American one, called Blue Ghost, developed by the company Firefly Aerospace for NASA; the other Japanese, named Resilience on behalf of the company ispace.
Both hope to repeat the feat of Intuitive Machines, the only private company to have succeeded in placing a machine on the Moon. Ispace attempted it in 2023, but its probe then accidentally crashed on the Moon.
Return of Americans to the Moon “mid-2027”
With its probe filled with multiple scientific instruments, NASA plans to conduct various research ranging from ““from understanding lunar dust to characterizing the structure and thermal properties of the Moon’s interior”explained Maria Banks, a scientific manager at the agency.
With the United States returning to the Moon planned for mid-2027, the American space agency wants to take advantage of this mission to test new navigation technologies to prepare for human missions.
Belgium
