China successfully landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, a major step for the country’s ambitious mission to place astronauts on the lunar surface.
The Chang’e-6 probe made a soft landing on the lunar surface around 6:23 a.m. local time in China, elevating China’s status among a number of space powers hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and lunar bases. in the next ten years.
The lunar program is part of growing competition with the United States, which remains a leader in space exploration, and other rising powers such as Japan and India.
The mission, described as China’s most complex robotic lunar mission, landed in a huge crater known as the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the China National Space Administration said.
This is China’s fourth successful moon landing after four attempts and the second successful landing on the far side of the moon. China remains the only country to have previously landed a probe in the region, with the Chang’e-4 probe in 2019.
The side of the moon permanently away from Earth is full of deep, dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations even more difficult.
Given these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the descent phase as the moment when failure is most likely.
“Landing on the far side of the Moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you rely on many links in the chain to control what’s going on, or you have to automate everything,” European Space Agency technical officer Neil Melville-Kenney said on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads. “He is working with China,” he said.
“Automation is very difficult, especially at high latitudes because you have long shadows and that can be confusing for landers,” Mr. Melville added.
The Chang’e-6 probe was launched from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan aboard China’s Long March 5 rocket on May 3 and reached the lunar environment about a week later before tightening its orbit in preparation for landing.
The Chang’e-6 lander will now use a drill and a mechanical arm to collect 2 kg of material from the Moon over two days and bring it back to Earth.
The samples will be transferred to a rocket booster on top of the lander, where the rocket will return to space and rendezvous with another spacecraft in lunar orbit before returning to Earth. It is expected to land in China’s Inner Mongolia region around June 25.
If all goes as planned, the samples collected will provide China with a pristine record of the moon’s 4.5 billion-year history and provide new clues about the formation of the solar system. It will also allow for an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region and the better-understood Earth-facing side of the moon.
China’s official Xinhua news agency said a simulation laboratory for the Chang’e-6 probe will develop and validate sampling strategies and equipment control procedures. It will use a full-scale replica of the sampling site based on exploration results of the environment, rock distribution, and lunar soil conditions around the landing site.
Chang’e-6 marks the world’s third Moon landing this year: Japan’s Slim lander touched down in January, followed the following month by a lander from US startup Intuitive Machines.
Other countries that sent spacecraft to Earth’s closest neighbor were the Soviet Union and India at the time. The United States is the only country to send humans to the moon since 1969.
China aims to put a man on the moon before 2030, which would make it the second country after the United States to do so.
As part of the US Artemis program, NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon again for the first time in more than 50 years, but NASA pushed the target date back to 2026 earlier this year.
The space agency has partnered with other countries, including those in Canada, Europe and Japan, whose astronauts will join the U.S. crew on the Artemis mission.
Artemis relies heavily on private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starship rocket aims to deliver the first astronaut landing this decade since NASA’s last Apollo mission in 1972.
On Saturday, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa canceled a special mission around the moon that he had paid for that would have used SpaceX’s Starship, citing scheduling uncertainties in the rocket’s development.
Boeing and NASA have postponed the first crewed launch of the company’s long-delayed capsule Starliner, which was expected to be the second U.S. space taxi to low-Earth orbit.
Additional reporting by agencies