These are the missions that will go to the Moon in 2023

Ispace’s Hakuto R mission, Rashid Rover

Hakuto-R is a lunar lander developed by ispace, a Japanese space technology. It launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on December 11, 2022, along with the Rashid Rover, the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover, and NASA’s Lunar Flashlight.
Even though the Hakuto lander launched in December 2022, it is only expected to reach the Moon by April 2023. This is because the lander is taking a slow, low-energy path that will see the spacecraft fly about 1.6 million kilometres from the Earth, before looping back and intersecting with the Moon by April next year.

Although Hakuto is in contention for the first privately-built lunar lander to go to the Moon, the lander of Pittsburgh-based Astrobiotic Technology and Houston-based Intuitive Machines might beat out the mission, even though it will not launch until early 2023. ispace’s 2.3-metre tall lander will aim for the Atlas crater in the northeastern section of the Moon’s near side. Shortly after launch, the Hakuto spacecraft sent back images of a “crescent Earth.”

The Rashid Rover is named after Dubai’s royal family and weighs just 10 kilograms. The United Arab Emirates’ lunar mission comes after the country sent a science satellite into orbit around Mars, and the rover will explore the lunar surface for about 10 days after it lands in April 2023.

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight

NASA’s Lunar Flashlight spacecraft also hitched a ride about the SpaceX M1 mission that launched Ispace’s lander and the Rashid Rover. The spacecraft is a small satellite that is about the size of a briefcase. It is currently on its three-month journey to the Moon. The mission’s trajectory will take the spacecraft far beyond the Moon, before the combined gravity of the Earth and the Sun helps it settle into a science-gathering lunar orbit.

While in the lunar orbit, it will swoop low over the Moon’s South Pole, where it will use lasers to shed light on dark craters, which according to NASA have not seen sunlight in billions of years. It is known that water exists in lunar regolith (soil), but scientists do not yet understand whether the floors of these craters are covered by surface ice frost. The Lunar Flashlight is designed to help scientists probe this.

India’s Chandrayaan-3

Chandrayaan-3 will be a follow up to the Chandrayaan 2 mission, which failed to achieve a soft-landing on the Moon for ISRO’s lunar lander and rover. Chandrayaan-3 will be a mission repeat of Chandrayaan-2, which will consist of a lunar lander and a lunar rover. The propulsion module behaves like a communications relay satellite for the spacecraft that land.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission is scheduled to launch aboard a Launch Vehicle Marks 3 (LVM3, earlier known as GSLV3) in June this year. The propulsion module will carry the lander and rover configuration to an orbit 100 kilometres above the lunar surface. The propulsion module will also carry a Spectro-polarimetry of HAbitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload to study the spectral and polarimetric measurements of Earth from the lunar orbit.

The payloads aboard the lunar lander will include Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. It will also carry a passive Laser Retroreflector Array from NASA for ranging studies.

The lunar rover will carry an Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to help scientists understand the elemental composition of the geography in the vicinity of the landing site.

Russia’s Luna 25 mission

After many delays, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency plans to launch its Luna-25 mission to the Moon in July 2023. According to Forbes, Luna-25 is a planned lunar lander mission, which will be the country’s first since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976.

The Luna 25 mission is scheduled to land at the Moon’s South Pole at a crater called Boguslavsky, and will serve as a preparatory mission that is largely about testing lunar landing landing technology. But it will also contain a suite of scientific instruments that will work on the Moon for about a year.

The Luna 25 mission will also lay a laser retroreflector that will allow laser beams to be sent from the Earth to the Moon. The time taken by the beams to be reflected back to Earth will help scientists measure precisely how far away the Moon is and how far it oscillates during its orbit around the Earth.

Bonus: dearMoon

Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought all the tickets for the maiden lunar voyage of Elon Musk-owned SpaceX. The mission is scheduled to happen in 2023, but according to Reuters, it faced many delays due to ongoing tests of the spacecraft and its rockets. While it can’t yet be confirmed whether the mission will launch in 2023, if it does, it will beat NASA’s manned Artemis 2 mission to the Moon.

The mission will be launched on SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle, and will take eight days from launch to splashdown on Earth. This includes the three days it will spend circling the moon in a lunar orbit that will take it within 200 kilometres of the Moon’s surface. Maezawa used Twitter to recruit eight crew members from around the world to join him in what could be the first manned mission to the Moon in more than 50 years.

Among the members selected is Indian actor Dev Joshi, who is joining a crew that largely comprises artists and photographers. Among the other high profile members is Choi Seng Hyun, a K-pop singer who was part of the band Big Band and Japanese-American musician Steve Aoki.