Chang’e-4 Lands on the Moon
Dear Commons Community,
China reached a milestone in space exploration yesterday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon, the country’s space agency announced. The landing of the probe, called Chang’e-4 after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology, is one in a coming series of missions that underscore the country’s ambitions to join the space race. As reported by the New York Times, China’s Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the far side of the moon.
China landed another rover on the moon in 2013, joining the United States and the Soviet Union as the only nations to have carried out a “soft landing” there, but the Chang’e-4 is the first to touch down on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from the Earth.
The mission “has opened a new chapter in humanity’s exploration of the moon,” the China National Space Administration said in an announcement on its website. The agency said the spacecraft landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time at its target on the far side of the moon.
The probe sent back to the earth the first close-up image of the moon’s far side using a relay satellite China calls “Queqiao,” or “Magpie Bridge,” the space agency said in a notice that included images it said were taken by the probe.
Although a latecomer by decades to space exploration, China is quickly catching up, experts say, and could challenge the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other fields.
“This space mission shows that China has reached the advanced world-class level in deep space exploration,” said Zhu Menghua, a professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology who has worked closely with the Chinese space agency. “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.”
China now plans to begin fully operating its third space station by 2022, to put astronauts in a lunar base by later in that decade, and to send probes to Mars, including ones that could return samples of the Martian surface back to Earth.
Though the moon is hardly untrodden ground after decades of exploration, a new landing is far more than just a propaganda coup, experts say.
The crater where the Chinese landed is the oldest and deepest on the moon, so the probe’s discoveries may offer insights into the moon’s origins and evolution. And some scientists suspect that the surrounding basin may be rich in minerals. If exploiting the moon’s resources is the next step in space development, a successful mission could leave the Chinese better positioned.
“This is a major achievement technically and symbolically,” said Namrata Goswami, an independent analyst who wrote about space for the Defense Department’s Minerva Research Institute. “China views this landing as just a steppingstone, as it also views its future manned lunar landing, since its long-term goal is to colonize the moon and use it as a vast supply of energy.”
The place the probe is exploring, Dr. Goswami said, could become a future refueling base for missions deeper into space in the way “navies viewed coaling stations, for purposes of refueling and resupply.”
Congratulations to the China National Space Administration! Wouldn’t it be wonderful for China and the United States to develop joint space exploration projects.
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
