Pakistan’s top IT bodies to host business forum event ahead of LEAP 2025 in Riyadh

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and China have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for the former’s first lunar rover to be included in Beijing’s Chang’E 8 mission, the national space agency in Islamabad said.
The Chang’E 8 mission is a robotic exploration of the lunar south pole expected to launch in 2028. Last year, the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), Pakistan’s space program, said its rover would land on the lunar south pole in 2028 as part of the Chang’ E 8 mission but a formal agreement has now been signed during a visit by President Asif Ali Zardari to China this week.
“Pakistan has made a significant leap in deep space exploration with the signing of a historic MoU between SUPARCO and the China National Space Administration,” the Pakistani agency said in a press release on Thursday.
Pakistan’s participation in the mission was a “milestone” in the country’s space program and its contribution to the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) initiative, the statement added.
“SUPARCO’s lunar rover will be deployed at the Moon’s south pole,” it said. “The rover will carry advanced scientific payloads developed by SUPARCO and an internationally designed scientific payload created through collaboration between Chinese and European scientists.”
The combined effort of Pakistan and China will enhance the mission’s capability to conduct an in-depth analysis of the lunar surface, the statement said, with Pakistani scientists able to operate the rover from Earth, map the lunar surface, study lunar soil composition, radiation levels and plasma properties and test new technologies for sustainable human presence.
Last May, Pakistan launched its first lunar satellite aboard China’s Chang’e-6 probe, which successful landed on the moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact crater on the side of the Moon that always faces away from Earth. The mission returned to earth in June, making China the first to bring back samples from the moon’s far side.

MIRZA VIRKAN: A Pakistani who drowned along with 12 compatriots when a boat carrying dozens of migrants capsized off northwest Africa was buried in his hometown on Thursday.
Each year thousands of Pakistanis pay large sums to traffickers to launch risky and illegal journeys to Europe, where they hope to find work and send funds to support families back home.

Pakistanis are frequently among those drowned on crammed boats which sink on the Mediterranean Sea separating North Africa from Europe — the world’s deadliest migrant route.
Islamabad’s foreign ministry this week said 13 of its citizens were among the dead recovered from a boat which went down in the Atlantic.

Around 80 passengers were aboard the vessel, which left Mauritania and sailed north toward Spain’s Canary Islands before it capsized near the Western Sahara port of Dakhla, the ministry said on January 16.
On Thursday the village of Mirza Virkan in eastern Punjab province buried Arslan Khan — one of four bodies from the shipwreck repatriated a day earlier.

“We sent Arslan to build a better future, and the trafficker assured us that he would send him legally,” his 34-year-old brother Adnan Khan told AFP.
“We sold our property and animals for Arslan’s future, but the trafficker betrayed us — he sent back our brother’s dead body.”

Pakistan has one of the highest rates of emigration in the world, according to the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration.
Many migrants depart from Punjab and the northeastern region of Pakistan administered Kashmir because their communities have historic ties to the country’s diaspora in Europe.
An official from the Federal Investigation Agency, speaking anonymously to AFP in 2023, estimated Pakistanis attempt 40,000 illegal trips every year.
In June that year the Mediterranean witnessed one of its worst migrant shipwrecks when a rusty and overloaded trawler sank overnight.
It was carrying more than 750 people — up to 350 of them Pakistanis according to Islamabad — but only 82 bodies were ever recovered.