China’s historic Chang’e-6 lands on moon’s far side to collect samples

BEIJING: In a successful lunar mission, China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe successfully landed on the far side of the Moon on Sunday to collect samples for the first time in human history, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced.

Supported by the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, the lander-ascender combination of the Chang’e-6 probe successfully landed at the designated landing area at 6:23 a.m. (Beijing Time) in the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin, Chinese news agency Xinhua said quoting CNSA.

Chang’e-6 consists of an orbiter, a returner, a lander, and an ascender. Since its launch on May 3 this year, it has gone through various stages such as Earth-moon transfer, near-moon braking, lunar orbiting, and landing descent.

The lander-ascender combination separated from the orbiter-returner combination on May 30, said the CNSA.

The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks, and great difficulty”, the agency said in a statement, opening a new tab on its website. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”

According to Li Chunlai, deputy chief designer of the Chang’e-6 mission, the probe landed precisely at the designated area. This area is likely to be covered with a lot of basalt, which is very beneficial for geological research and can deliver significant scientific value.

The landing site is at an impact crater known as the Apollo Basin, located within the SPA Basin. The choice was made for the Apollo Basin’s potential value of scientific exploration, as well as the conditions of the landing area, including communication and telemetry conditions and the flatness of the terrain, said Huang Hao, a space expert from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).

The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the United States are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.

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.

Given these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the landing phase as a moment where the chance of failure is the highest.