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BEIJING: China landed an unmanned spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday (June 2), overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to obtain the world’s first rock and soil samples from the moon’s dark hemisphere.
The landing boosts China’s status as a space power amid a global rush to the moon, with countries including the United States hoping to mine lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and build a lunar base within the next decade.
The Chang’e-6 spacecraft, carrying a range of tools and its own launcher, landed in the South Pole-Aitken Basin, a huge impact crater on the side of the moon facing space, at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time, the China National Space Administration said.
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty,” the agency said in a statement. statement “The payload on board the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions,” it wrote on its website.
The successful completion of the mission was China’s second mission to the far side of the moon, an area no other country has ever reached before. The far side of the moon is always facing away from the Earth and is covered with deep, dark craters, which poses greater challenges for communications and robotic landing operations.
Given these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the landing phase as the moment with the highest chance of failure.
“Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because there is no line-of-sight communication and you need to rely on a lot of links in the chain to control what is happening or you have to automate what is happening,” said Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at the European Space Agency who is overseeing the launch of one of the Chang’e-6 payloads in partnership with China.
“Automation is very difficult, especially at high latitudes because the shadows are long, which can confuse the lander,” Melville added.
this Chang’e 6 probe launched on May 3 Chang’e-4 was launched from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island aboard China’s Long March 5 rocket and arrived near the moon about a week later before entering orbit to prepare for landing.
Chang’e-6 is the world’s third lunar landing this year: Japan’s SLIM lander touched down in January, and a lander from U.S. startup Intuitive Machines also landed successfully the following month.
Other countries that have sent spacecraft to Earth’s nearest neighbor are the then-Soviet Union and India. The United States is the only country to have sent humans to the moon, starting in 1969.
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