Beijing’s landmark mission to retrieve the first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere successfully ended on Sunday ( Jun 2 ) with the arrival of an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon.
China’s position as a room power is strengthened by the landing in a worldwide search for the moon, where nations like the United States are aiming to use lunar minerals to fund long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next ten years.
The Chang’e- 6 art, equipped with an array of tools and its own app, touched down in a giant impact crater called the South Pole- Aitken Basin on the planet’s area- facing side at 6.23am Beijing time, the China National Space Administration said.
The goal “involves numerous executive advances, large risks and great difficulty”, the organization said in a , statement , on its site. The Chang’e- 6 lander’s loads will function as intended and support technological investigation operations.
The next time China has conducted its vision on the other side of the sun, a region no other nation has reached. Deep and dark holes adorn the side of the moon that is constantly facing away from the Earth, making mechanical landings and communications more difficult.
Given these difficulties, Chang’e- 6 mission’s solar and place researchers described the landing stage as a point where the chance of failure is the highest.
” Landing on the far side of the sky is extremely challenging because you do n’t had line-of-sight communications, you rely on a lot of links in the chain to handle what is happening, or you have to automate what is happening,” said Neil Melville- Kenney, a professional officer at the European Space Agency working with China on one of the Chang’e- 6 payloads.
” Automation is very difficult, especially at high latitudes, because you have long shadows, which can be very confusing for landers”, Melville added.
The Chang’e- 6 probe launched on May 3 on China ‘s , Long March 5 rocket , from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan, reaching the lunar vicinity roughly a week later before tightening its orbit in preparation for a landing.
Chang’e- 6 marks the world’s third lunar landing this year: Japan’s SLIM lander touched down in January, followed the next month by a lander from U. S. startup Intuitive Machines.
The Soviet Union and India are the other two nations that have sent spacecraft to Earth’s closest neighbor. The only nation to have landed people on the moon since 1969 is the United States.