Europe has built its first moon rover and it is going to land on the moon tonight.
Interestingly, the rover named Tenacious will carry a small red house and a scoop to the moon as part of its mission.
The rover, which was sent into space from Earth in January on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, is so small that it's one of the tiniest and lightest rovers ever made in the world and is about the size of a carry-on-suitcase and weighs only 5kg, as per Sky News.
ispace EUROPE's chief executive Dr Julien Lamamy said in a statement, "It's a big deal. We've designed this rover, built it, tested a lot of it, and we're going to operate it all from Luxembourg."
The statement added, "We're showing that in Europe, [...] space companies have a startup mindset that can contribute a lot to the achievements of the European space."
Not only this, Tenacious is the first rover made by a private company to work on the moon's surface.
As per the outlet, it will drive around and do its mission for about ten day.
After that, it will stop working as moon will become too cold and dark for the rover to function.
Story behind tiny red house landing on the Moon:
A tiny red house made by Swedish artist Mikael Genberg will be put on the moon. It will be photographed to show a creative and inspiring story about new opportunities.
Genberg has always wanted to send his artwork to the moon for 25 years but in the past only official space agencies could do missions to the moon.
Now, private missions like this one make it possible.
Other than this, scoop will collect moon dust which will be sold to NASA for $5,000.
