BEIJING (Reuters) -China successfully landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the moon’s far side, a significant milestone in its mission. This achievement paves the way for retrieving the world’s first rock and soil samples.
China’s successful landing enhances its space prowess amid global lunar exploration efforts. Countries, like the United States, aim to exploit lunar resources for sustained space missions.
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 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (2223 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty”, the agency said in a statement on its website. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
The successful 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.
“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.
The China moon mission’s sample-retrieval component holds immense scientific significance and potential. Moreover, it paves the way for groundbreaking research and analysis of lunar samples.
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