Marking 50 years since man first set foot on the Moon, China became the first nation to land a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon.
According to China Global Television Network America, on January 2, a Chinese spacecraft launched from China in early December and carrying a rover landed in a crater on the side of the Moon that always faces away from Earth. The landing marks a major technological achievement for the country and puts China among the elite nations in spaceflight.
The successful landing was one of a series of planned missions, codenamed Chang'e-4 mission, aimed at exploring the lunar surface. Before that, China had sent a spacecraft with a rover to the far side of the Moon, making it the third country to soft-land on its surface.
This was no easy feat, and no one had ever done it before, because it is difficult to communicate with robots on the side of the Moon that we cannot see. Without direct line of sight to Earth, there is no easy way to receive radio signals from spacecraft on the dark side of the Moon. And to put it bluntly, it is not the dark side, since the sun can see it, it is simply not visible from Earth. So the term “remote” is more appropriate.
China managed to establish communication using a lunar satellite it launched in May, which acts as an intermediary between the spacecraft and Earth.
The landing on the Moon took place in a crater on the south pole called Aitken. This is an area of the lunar surface that many scientists want to explore. The crater, which is about 1,550 miles wide, is thought to be a very old crater, created when a huge rock hit the Moon billions of years ago. Estimating the exact age of the basin created by the impact could help us learn more about when that event occurred, providing clues about what the environment of the Solar System was like.
Chang'e-4 may not be able to calculate the exact age of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, but it is equipped with a host of scientific instruments that will tell us more about this mysterious part of the Moon. The spacecraft will soon deploy its rover, which will learn more about the composition and structure of rocks in this region. For now, it will focus on the sky, collecting data for astronomers here on Earth, who are eager to take advantage of the spacecraft's unique location on the far side of the Moon. At night, when the Moon shields this region from both the Sun and radio signals from Earth, the spacecraft should have an unparalleled view of the stars.
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