The European Space Agency's Lunar Lander mission will aim to land a robot on the surface in 2018.
The unmanned lander will be the first European spacecraft to land on the Moon and will feature a robotic arm for taking samples and on board diagnostic equipment to analyze them. The Lunar Lander will touch down at the Moon's south pole where no exploration missions have ever been before.
The lander will also be armed with sophisticated guidance technology allowing it to digitally map the ground as it approaches, pick an ideal landing spot and touch down on the lunar surface all on its own.
The European Space Agency is aiming for the Moon with their Lunar Lander mission, anticipated to arrive on the lunar surface in 2018
What a complete waste of time and money. What the moon has to offer has already been well sampled and analysed by the Apollo missions. Absolutely ridiculous! Could they not find something better to spend all that money on?
What a complete waste of time and money. What the moon has to offer has already been well sampled and analysed by the Apollo missions. Absolutely ridiculous! Could they not find something better to spend all that money on? I agree. They need to find some Moon precious metal deposits and get a mining colony established instead of wasting funds just so the EU can see we put a man on the moon.
What a complete waste of time and money. What the moon has to offer has already been well sampled and analysed by the Apollo missions. Absolutely ridiculous! Could they not find something better to spend all that money on? The only thing ridiculous is your post I'm afraid. Apollo barely scratched the surface of the moon. It posed more questions than answers. Apollo visited only 6 locations on the moon, all of them relatively flat and relatively close to the equator. In recent years the lunar poles have become areas of extreme interest to planetary geologists. At the poles there are crater floo... [More]
A nice rover type robot exploring the moon would be better! Not necessarily true. What rovers gain in mobility they lose in payload. The wheels, motors, etc all add weight. This weight means that less scientific instruments can be carried. It is not a case of rover being better than lander or vice versa, it is a matter of horses for courses.
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