By Joey Roulette and Joe Brock
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on Sunday, a historic mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the Moon’s dark hemisphere, a announced the Chinese space agency.
The landing elevates China’s status as a space power amid a global rush to the Moon, where countries including the United States hope to mine lunar minerals to support astronaut missions and lunar bases at long term over the next decade.
The Chang’e-6 spacecraft, equipped with a set of tools and its own launcher, landed in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken basin, on the space side of the Moon, at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (10:23 p.m. GMT). ), the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said in a statement posted on its website.
The mission “involves many technical innovations, high risks and great difficulties,” the CNSA said. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will operate as designed and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
This successful mission is China’s second to the far side of the Moon, a region that no other country has reached. The back of the Moon faces Earth constantly and is dotted with deep, dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations more difficult.
The Chang’e-6 probe was launched on May 3 aboard China’s Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan, reaching the lunar neighborhood about a week later before to tighten its orbit in preparation for a landing.
Using a shovel and a drill, the lander will aim to collect 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of lunar material and return it to Earth.
The samples will be transferred to a rocket booster atop the lander, which will fly back into space, join another spacecraft in lunar orbit and return, with a landing in China’s Inner Mongolia region planned around June 25.
If all goes as planned, the mission will provide China with an intact record of the Moon’s 4.5 billion year history and provide new clues about the formation of the solar system. It will also allow an unprecedented comparison of the dark, unexplored region of the Moon versus the better-understood Earth.
China’s broader lunar strategy includes landing the first astronaut around 2030 in a program in which Russia is an emerging partner. In 2020, China conducted its first lunar sample return mission with Chang’e-5, retrieving samples from the Moon’s near side.
The United States, with its Artemis program, is also considering a crewed moon landing by the end of 2026 or later. NASA has partnered with several space agencies, including those in Canada, Europe and Japan, whose astronauts will join American crews on a future Artemis mission.
(Reporting by Joe Brock in Singapore and Joey Roulette in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; editing by Chris Reese, Richard Chang and William Mallard)
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