Archive photo of an Ispace lunar rover at its lunar rover test site in Luxembourg-Hollerich Matic Zorman/archives

Archive photo of an Ispace lunar rover at its lunar rover test site in Luxembourg-Hollerich Matic Zorman/archives

The two are strategic partners in the roving spectrometer programmer for lunar resource prospecting, as part of the Luxembourg Spaceresources.lu initiative, launched in 2016.

The initiative forms part of Luxembourg’s strategy to take a piece of the estimated €170bn generated in space resource use in the next 25 years.

As part of the initiative, Luxembourg has created a legal, regulatory framework on space resources, and attracted around 20 newspace companies to Luxembourg.

The roving spectrometer instrument would be used for lunar resource prospecting. The two are developing a space deployable 1D focal plane detector for a compact magnetic sector mass spectrometer as key technology for lunar ice and regolith elementary analysis.

On 9 January, members of the public can see a live transmission of a rover on the lunar ground test site at Ispace Europe, in Luxembourg, at 10am. Click here to view it.