Liz Lee, Joey Roulette, Joe Block, Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING (Reuters) – China landed an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, overcoming a key hurdle in a groundbreaking mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.
The landing boosts China’s status as a space power amid a global surge to the moon, where countries including the United States hope to use lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and lunar bases within the next decade.
Equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, Chang’e-6 landed in a huge impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the space side of the moon at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (11:23 p.m. GMT), according to the China National Space Administration.
The mission “involves many engineering breakthroughs, high risks and great challenges,” the space agency said in a statement on its website. “The payload carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will function as planned and carry out its scientific exploration mission.”
The successful mission is China’s second to the far side of the moon, which no other country has reached. The far side of the moon, which always faces away from Earth, is pockmarked with deep, dark craters, making communications and robotic landing missions even more difficult.
Given these challenges, lunar and space experts who worked on the Chang’e-6 mission said the landing phase was the moment most likely to fail.
“Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications and you have to rely on many links in the chain to control what’s going on, or you have to automate what’s going on,” said Neil Melville-Kenny, a technical officer at the European Space Agency working with China on one of Chang’e-6’s payloads.
“Automation is particularly difficult at high latitudes, where there are long shadows that can be very disruptive to landers,” Melville added.
The Chang’e-6 probe was launched on May 3 aboard China’s Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on China’s southern Hainan island, and reached the vicinity of the moon about a week later, narrowing its orbit in preparation for landing.
Chang’e-6 will be the world’s third lunar landing this year, following Japan’s SLIM lander in January and one from US start-up Intuitive Machines the following month.
The only other nations to have sent spacecraft to Earth’s closest neighbour were the Soviet Union and India. The US is the only country to have landed humans on the moon since 1969.
Lunar Sampling
The Chang’e 6 lander will use a shovel and drill to collect 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of lunar material over two days and aim to return it to Earth.
The samples will be transferred to a rocket booster atop the lander, which will then be launched back into space to rendezvous with another spacecraft in lunar orbit and return to land in China’s Inner Mongolia region around June 25.
If all goes according to plan, the mission will provide China with a complete record of the Moon’s 4.5 billion-year history, shed new light on the formation of our solar system, and allow an unprecedented comparison of this dark, unexplored region with the better-understood side of the Moon facing Earth.
According to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, the Chang’e-6 probe’s simulation laboratory will develop and verify sample collection strategies and instrument control procedures, using a life-size replica of the sample collection area based on the results of investigations into the environment around the landing site, rock distribution and lunar soil conditions.
China’s lunar strategy, as part of a plan with Russia as a partner, includes landing its first astronauts around 2030. In 2020, China conducted its first lunar sample return mission with Chang’e-5, which retrieved samples from the near side of the moon.
The U.S. Artemis program envisions a manned moon landing sometime after late 2026. NASA has partnered with space agencies in Canada, Europe, Japan, and other countries, and astronauts from those countries will participate in the Artemis program alongside U.S. astronauts.
The Artemis program relies heavily on private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starship rocket aims to attempt the first astronaut landings this decade since NASA’s final Apollo mission in 1972.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa on Saturday canceled a private mission to the moon using SpaceX’s Starship, which he had funded, citing uncertainty about the rocket’s development timeline.
Boeing and NASA have postponed the launch of the company’s first crewed spacecraft, Starliner, a long-delayed capsule that was set to be America’s second space taxi to low Earth orbit.
(Reporting by Liz Lee and Eduardo Baptista in Beijing, Joe Block in Singapore and Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Editing by Chris Rees, Richard Chan, William Mallard and Michael Perry)
