The Moon is a peculiar thing in the skies of our world. A companion to Earth since times immemorial, it always shows us the same face, meaning there's an entire half of the satellite we know very little about. And China just sent a probe there to snatch samples and bring them back home.
The Moon always shows Earthlings the same face because it's tidally locked. That's a condition in celestial mechanics that means the time it takes the Moon to rotate around its own axis is equal to the time it takes the Moon to complete an orbit around our planet.
We call the half of the Moon we never see the far side, and it has been a topic for many speculations, works of literature, and movies over the years. And that despite all 24 of the Apollo astronauts have seen it firsthand as they circled the Moon on their back home, and despite the many photos and videos snapped by countless probes.
What the world never got so far from the far side of the Moon are samples, and that's exactly what the Chinese are planning to change with a mission that officially began on Friday, May 3.
The Chinese have already become the first nation on the planet to effectively land something on the far side of the Moon. It happened in 2019 when the Chang'e-4 mission performed the first-ever soft landing up there. One year later, Chang'e 5 managed to snatch samples from the Moon's near side, and now a follow-up mission called Chang'e-6 will try to achieve even more.
The mission is centered around a namesake spacecraft (Chang'e is the goddess of the Moon in Chinese mythology), which comprises an orbiter, a lander, an ascent vehicle, and a re-entry module.
Photo: China Xinhua News
The uncrewed spacecraft launched on Friday on top of a Long March-5 rocket, departing a launch pad located at the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the Hainan island. It will travel to its designated orbit and send down the lander to start its work.
Once the samples are collected, the ascent vehicle will climb to the orbiter floating around the Moon, and head back home. Once it reaches its destination, Chang'e-6 will drop its re-entry module in China's backyard.
Because there is no direct line of sight between the Earth and the Moon's far side, the Chinese Space Agency (CNSA) will use for comms a relay satellite called Queqiao-2, which was placed in lunar orbit in advance, back in March.
This mission, considered to be the country's most complex to date, is scheduled to last for up to 53 days. The designated landing spot is a crater on the far side of the Moon called the South Pole–Aitken basin.
The place is a positively huge impact crater that's 1,600 miles (2,500 km) in diameter and is believed to have been formed about four billion years ago. It's hoped that the samples collected from there (meaning moon dust and rocks) will inform our species on the evolution of Earth's companion in particular, but of the solar system as well.
The collection of samples is the primary mission of the Chang'e 6 spacecraft, but its lander carries with it a series of other instruments from international partners as well.
Photo: China Xinhua News
France, for instance, sent up on this flight an instrument called Detection of Outgassing Radon (DORN), meant to study how volatiles like water ice are transported in a natural fashion between the surface and the exosphere.
The Italians are on board with the INstrument for landing-Roving laser Retroreflector Investigations (INNRI), which is effectively a laser range finder. The Swedes, on the other hand, are using the Chinese mission to test the Negative Ions on Lunar Surface (NILS), a detector of negative ions reflected by the surface.
If successful, the Chang'e-6 will inform an upcoming crewed mission of the Chinese to the Moon. The nation has already stated its goals of landing humans up there by the end of this decade (and even establishing a Moon base in the not-so-distant future), and the sample return mission will basically go through all the motions of a human moon flight: launch, landing, departure, and re-entry.
China launched the Chang'e program in 2007 and by 2030 two more are planned. The seventh mission is scheduled to take off in 2026 and it will be aimed at finding resources (more specifically water ice) at the Moon's South Pole, the same thing American NASA is gunning for at about the same time.
Then, Chang'e 8 is expected to fly in 2028, and its mission is to find ways to use available lunar resources to construct a lunar research base.
We'll keep an eye out on the current mission in the coming hours (the spacecraft just launched about an hour ago at the time of writing) and update this story if something notable happens.
A Long March-5 rocket, carrying the Chang'e-6 spacecraft, blasted off from its launchpad at the Wenchang Space Launch Site on the coast of China's southern island province of Hainan on Friday afternoon. pic.twitter.com/r0WSP5KkdF
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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