China has managed to land a new unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the Moon this Sunday with the aim of recovering for the first time samples of rock and soil from the lunar hemisphere furthest from Earth and bringing them back for study. The Chang’e-6 lander is the second of the Asian nation to land on that mysterious dark side – it already did, a region that no other country has managed to reach due to the difficulties involved in communications and landing.
The landing marks a new milestone in the Chinese Moon exploration program, where different countries, including the United States, hope to exploit minerals to sustain stable long-term bases over the next decade.
The Chang’e-6 module, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, landed in a gigantic impact crater called the south polar Aitken Basin on the space-facing side of the Moon at 6:23 Beijing time (midnight). in Spain), as reported by the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulties,” the agency said in a statement on its website. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will function as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
The successful mission is China’s second to the far side of the Moon, which no other country has reached. The side of the Moon that always faces away from Earth is dotted with deep, dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations difficult.
Faced with these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the landing phase as a time when the chances of failure are greatest. “Landing on the far side of the Moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you depend on many links in the chain to control what happens or you have to automate what happens,” explained Neil Melville-Kenney, technical officer. of the European Space Agency working with China on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads.
«Automation is very difficultespecially at high latitudes, because there are long shadows that can be very confusing for landers,” Melville added.
The Chang’e-6 probe It was released on May 3 on China’s Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan, and reached the lunar vicinity about a week later, before adjusting its orbit in preparation for a landing.
Chang’e-6 marks the third moon landing in the world this year: Japan’s SLIM lander touched down in January, followed the following month by a lander from American startup Intuitive Machines, although its lander, Odysseus, suffered several setbacks during landing.
The other countries that have sent spacecraft to Earth’s nearest neighbor are the then Soviet Union and India. The United States is the only country to have landed humans on the Moon since 1969.
Moon Sampling
Using a shovel and a drill, the Chang’e-6 lander will aim collect 2 kg of lunar material for two days and bring it back to Earth.
The samples will be transferred to a booster rocket atop the lander, which will be launched back into space, connect with another spacecraft in lunar orbit and return. A landing is expected in China’s Inner Mongolia region around June 25th.
If all goes as planned, the mission will provide China with a pristine record of the Moon’s 4.5 billion-year history and shed new clues about the formation of the solar system. It will also allow an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region with the better understood side of the Moon facing Earth. A scientific milestone.
The Chang’e-6 object is something similar to what China already did in 2020 with the previous Chang’e-5 mission, only with the added difficulty of doing it on the hidden side of the satellite. Four years ago, China managed to return 2 kg of lunar rocks to our planet in what was the first sample return mission since the Soviet ‘Luna 24’ in 1976. The Asian giant is the third country capable of returning lunar samples to our planet. planet, after the United States and Russia (then Soviet Union), and the first to achieve it from the hidden side. China’s lunar strategy includes landing of its first astronaut around 2030 in a program that has Russia as a partner.
