by Madeleine Hubbard
China on Sunday landed an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon in a landmark mission to retrieve what is expected to be the first ever rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.
The Chang’e-6 craft, which is equipped with its own launcher, landed in a large impact crater before 6:30 a.m. Beijing time, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty,” the China National Space Administration said, as translated. The craft will collect samples by drilling into rocks and soil on the moon and taking samples from the lunar surface.
“Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you’re relying on a lot of links in the chain to control what is going on, or you have to automate what is going on,” said Neil Melville-Kenney, according to Reuters. Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at the European Space Agency, is working with China on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads.
The accomplishment is a leap for China in the lunar space race as many countries, including the United States, are hoping to use lunar minerals for long-term astronaut missions within the next decade.
– – –
Follow Just the News reporter Madeleine Hubbard on X or Instagram.
Photos by China National Space Administration.
The post China Lands on the Far Side of the Moon in Historic Mission first appeared on The Arizona Sun Times.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Just the News
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://arizonasuntimes.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.