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.
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Photos by China National Space Administration.
