Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) is the Dubai government entity that runs much of the United Arab Emirates' national space programme. It was formed on 6 February 2006 as the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST), starting with five engineers, and was reorganised under a 2015 Dubai law that made EIAST an affiliated institution of the centre. Its chairman is H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum and its Director General is Salem Humaid Al Marri. The centre is based in the Al Khawaneej area of Dubai.

For RobotToday readers, MBRSC's main robotics work is the Emirates Lunar Mission (ELM), a programme to develop a series of rovers that explore different locations on the Moon with different science goals. Each rover is named Rashid after Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum. The first, Rashid 1, was a compact four-wheeled rover of about 10 kg dry mass and roughly 53.5 x 53.9 cm. It carried two high-resolution cameras, a microscopic camera, a thermal imaging camera and a Langmuir probe for studying lunar plasma and dust. It launched on 11 December 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 aboard ispace's HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander. That lander lost contact moments before its planned touchdown at Atlas crater on 25 April 2023 and crashed, so Rashid 1 never reached the surface. MBRSC still counts the mission as the first time a rover from the region reached lunar orbit.

Rashid 2 is the second ELM rover, also designed, developed and built by MBRSC. It will fly on Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 2, which targets a landing on the far side of the Moon. Firefly announced the agreement in May 2025. In December 2025 MBRSC reported that the rover had passed interface tests with Firefly in the US, covering electrical, software and mechanical interfaces with the lander, rover-to-lander wireless performance, and deployment and drive-off. Before shipping, the rover had vibration testing with EDGE Group subsidiary EARTH in the UAE and thermal-vacuum testing at CNES in Toulouse. Its science package, put together by an international team led by MBRSC, will study lunar surface geology and thermal properties, dust behaviour, the photoelectron sheath and plasma environment, and how different materials interact with the regolith, including adhesion and abrasion. Canada's Mission Control supplies the wireless surface-communications subsystem that links the rover to the lander. The Emirates Lunar Mission is funded by the TDRA ICT Fund.

MBRSC's other work sits mostly outside robotics. It developed the DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2 Earth-observation satellites, the Nayif-1 nanosatellite, KhalifaSat (330 kg, launched October 2018, the first satellite designed and manufactured entirely in the UAE), DMSat-1 and MBZ-SAT. It also led the Emirates Mars Mission's Hope Probe, which reached Mars orbit in February 2021. The centre runs the UAE Astronaut Programme, which flew Hazzaa AlMansoori to the ISS in 2019 and Sultan AlNeyadi on a six-month Expedition 69 stay in 2023. It is building the Emirates Airlock for NASA's Gateway lunar station and provides ground-station services to partners.