Having successfully launched its first lunar lander more than two years ago, China on Friday announced an ambitious plan to become the first nation to have a probe touch down on the far side of the moon, and they apparently plan to accomplish this by the end of 2018.
Gizmodo and Ars Technica, citing reports published by the Chinese state news agency Xinhua, explained that the officials involved with the country’s space program are preparing a new rover known as Chang’e-4 for use in the mission. Its predecessor, the Chang’e-3, is the lander which successfully soft-landed on the near side of the moon back in December 2013.
Research based on findings from the Chang’e-3 mission’s Yutu rover, which were published last month, found that the moon had a far more complex geological history than previously thought, the websites explained. With the Chang’e-4 project, China hopes to collect lunar materials from the thicker crust found on the dark side of the moon and bring it back to Earth for analysis.
Liu Jizhong, chief of the China State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) lunar exploration center, told Xinhua that Chang’e-4 would be the first mission to ever explore the far side of the moon, which always faces away from Earth due to a phenomenon known as gravitational or tidal locking.
Chang’e-4 to study the dark side’s geology, composition
Liu also explained that Chang’e-4 is similar in design to its predecessor, but will be capable of handling a much larger payload. Like Chang’e-3, it will be designed to make a soft landing, and then it will begin collecting samples and analyzing the composition of the dark side’s crust.
Chang’e-4 is the next phase of China’s three-step program to study the moon by orbiting, landing, and returning spacecraft to the orbiting satellite. The probe which will be used in the final step of the program, the Chang’e-5, is currently in development by Chinese scientists, said Liu.
President Xi Jinping has made advancing China’s space program a top priority, and emphasizes that the research will be used solely for peaceful purposes, according to Reuters. Back in March, his administration said that it would open up its lunar exploration to non-state operated, private sector companies, and it has vowed to cooperate with foreign nations on its space program.
While no man-made spacecraft has successfully landed on the dark side of the moon, the region has been photographed, as the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft snapped a handful of grainy images of its surface in 1959, said Ars Technica. Those photos revealed a far more mountainous terrain than had been spotted on the near side, with only a pair of dark, low-lying regions.
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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