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A Chinese spacecraft successfully landed on the far side of the moon on Sunday, marking a major achievement for the country amidst the growing 21st-century space rivalry with the US.
The mission is the sixth in the Chang’e moon exploration programme, which is named after a Chinese moon goddess.
The Chang’e-6 lunar probe landed early in the morning (Beijing time) in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, a large 13-kilometre-deep crater created four billion years ago. It immediately set out to collect rock and soil samples from the surface that could provide valuable insights into how the lesser-explored far side of the moon compares to the near side. The Chang’e 5 mission already brought back samples from the near side in 2020.
In the current mission, the lunar lander used a mechanical arm and a drill to gather up to two kilogrammes of surface and underground material over about two days. An ascender atop the lander will then take the samples in a metal vacuum container back to another module that is orbiting the moon. The container will be transferred to a re-entry capsule that is due to return to Earth in the deserts of China’s Inner Mongolia region around June 25th.
No other country has landed a probe on the far side of the moon, and the Chang’e-6 is China’s second. Missions to the far side of the moon are especially difficult because of communication challenges and its pockmark deep craters, per Yahoo! News.
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty,” the China National Space Administration said in a statement. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
Only two other spacecraft have reached the moon so far this year, one Japanese and one from US startup Intuitive Machines. Chang’e-6 is the sixth moon exploration for China, as it heavily invests in space exploration. The country also operates its own crewed space station in rivalry with the International Space Station and says it will place astronauts on the moon by 2030.
Since no person has set foot on the moon since 1972 (though NASA has plans to go back in 2026 at the earliest), that mission would make it the second nation to place astronauts on the moon after the US.
Meanwhile, per EuroNews, US efforts to use private-sector rockets to launch spacecraft have been repeatedly delayed. Last-minute computer trouble nixed the planned launch of Boeing’s first astronaut flight on Saturday.
A Japanese billionaire called off his plan to orbit the moon on this trip because of uncertainty over the development of a mega-rocket by SpaceX. NASA is planning to use the rocket to send its astronauts to the moon.