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The Rashid Rover Prepares For Its Lunar Exploration Mission
The UAE’s lunar mission will take off tomorrow, helping scientists figure out how to colonize new planets.
Tomorrow (Wednesday, November 30th), at 12:39pm (Gulf Standard Time), the Emirati-made Rashid Rover will lift off on its mission to the Moon, while the entire Arab world looks on with pride at this huge milestone.
Rashid Rover, named after Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, will touch down on the southeastern edge of the Moon’s Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold), from where it will begin capturing data from the vast, unexplored basins of the lunar surface.
Sending home over 10 gigabytes of scientific data and images, Rashid Rover will help scientists to study the lunar geology by supplying information on soil content, plasma levels, dust movement and other details. The advanced vehicle will carry out its mission using 3D cameras, motion sensor systems, and communication tools powered by solar panels.
As well as helping experts back on Earth to better understand our own origins, Rashid Rover will also be at the forefront of developing new technologies that could see humans colonizing the Moon and, eventually, Mars.
“The mission embodies the aspirations of the UAE. Rashid Rover will collect images and information that will allow the UAE to conduct comprehensive and integrated studies on how to build a human settlement on the Moon, prepare for future missions to study Mars and provide the scientific community with answers about the solar system and other planets,” says Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in an official statement.
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To reach its destination, Rashid Rover will hitch a lift on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket before making the final leg of the journey to the Moon’s surface using a lander called Hakuto-R M1. As the lander gets closer to the deck, the Japanese-made craft will first orbit the Moon in an elliptical trajectory before entering into a soft, vertical descent performed by fully-automated guidance systems.
Rashid Rover is the first of the UAE’s missions to the Moon, but it certainly won’t be the last. In September, MBRSC signed an agreement with the Chinese National Space Administration to begin joint projects and future lunar exploration, including sending another rover to the Moon on board Chang’e 7, which is expected to launch in 2026.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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