China yesterday landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.
The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the US are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.
The Chang’e-6 craft, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, touched down in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon’s space-facing side at 6:23am, the China National Space Administration said.
Photo: AFP
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty,” the agency said in a statement on its Web site. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
The mission is China’s second on the far side of the moon, a region no other country has reached. The side of the moon perpetually facing away from the Earth is dotted with deep and dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations more challenging.
Given these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the landing phase as a moment where the chance of failure is the highest.
“Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you’re relying on a lot of links in the chain to control what is going on, or you have to automate what is going on,” said Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at the European Space Agency working with China on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads.
“Automation is very difficult especially at high latitudes because you have long shadows which can be very confusing for landers,” Melville added.
The Chang’e-6 probe launched on May 3 on China’s Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan Province, reaching the lunar vicinity about a week later before tightening its orbit in preparation for a landing.
Chang’e-6 marks the world’s third lunar landing this year: Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon touched down in January, followed the next month by a lander from US start-up Intuitive Machines.
Using a scoop and drill, the Chang’e-6 lander would attempt to collect 2kg of lunar material over two days and bring it back to Earth.
The samples would be transferred to a rocket booster atop the lander, which would launch back into space, tag up with another spacecraft in lunar orbit and return, with a landing in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region around June 25.
If all goes as planned, the mission would provide China with a pristine record of the moon’s 4.5 billion-year history and yield new clues on the solar system’s formation. It would also allow for an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region with the moon’s better understood Earth-facing side.
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