The UAE and France have signed a letter of intent to develop lunar spacecrafts together.
It was among a number of important agreements and deals signed during French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the UAE this weekend.
The letter was signed on Saturday by officials from both the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre and the French National Centre for Space Studies (Cnes).
Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and French President Emmanuel Macron were also in attendance.
“The letter of intent was signed by Salem Al Marri, director general of the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, and Philippe Baptiste, chief executive of Cnes, as both parties aim to strengthen their collaboration in lunar exploration through working on advanced spacecrafts,” the space centre said.
The UAE has a long-term lunar exploration plan that involves launching several space vehicles to the Moon, including orbiters and rovers.
The French space agency is already collaborating with the UAE on its first lunar mission, which includes Rashid, a tiny 10-kilogram rover that will study lunar soil.
France has provided two optical cameras for the mission, including one to be placed on top of the Rashid rover to provide panoramic views of its surroundings.
The second camera could deliver high spatial resolution images of the lunar soil and analyse wheel-soil interaction.
Rashid will be carried to the Moon on a Japanese lander, called Hakuto-R, being built by private company ispace. Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch the mission on a Falcon 9 rocket.
The space centre is working on another rover as a backup and for use in the country’s Moon exploration programme, which could be launched in 2024 or 2025.
“To increase our chances, we are doing it this way. So, we are working on the next and the next rover,” said Hamad Al Marzooqi, project manager of the Emirates Lunar Mission.
“We will not put all our eggs in one basket. However, we are happy with ispace’s progress.
“But landing on the surface of the Moon is something very risky — even very advanced institutional agencies cannot guarantee success for landing and we have seen failures in the past couple of years.”
Meet UAE's new astronauts — in pictures
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Gender equality in the workplace still 200 years away
It will take centuries to achieve gender parity in workplaces around the globe, according to a December report from the World Economic Forum.
The WEF study said there had been some improvements in wage equality in 2018 compared to 2017, when the global gender gap widened for the first time in a decade.
But it warned that these were offset by declining representation of women in politics, coupled with greater inequality in their access to health and education.
At current rates, the global gender gap across a range of areas will not close for another 108 years, while it is expected to take 202 years to close the workplace gap, WEF found.
The Geneva-based organisation's annual report tracked disparities between the sexes in 149 countries across four areas: education, health, economic opportunity and political empowerment.
After years of advances in education, health and political representation, women registered setbacks in all three areas this year, WEF said.
Only in the area of economic opportunity did the gender gap narrow somewhat, although there is not much to celebrate, with the global wage gap narrowing to nearly 51 per cent.
And the number of women in leadership roles has risen to 34 per cent globally, WEF said.
At the same time, the report showed there are now proportionately fewer women than men participating in the workforce, suggesting that automation is having a disproportionate impact on jobs traditionally performed by women.
And women are significantly under-represented in growing areas of employment that require science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills, WEF said.
* Agence France Presse
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Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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