JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020. DISCOVER 15China Explores the
Lunar Far Side
Chinese state media announced the
successful landing of the Chang’e-
mission on Jan. 3. It’s the first craft to
land on the far side of the moon. The
spacecraft touched down in Von Kármán
crater, which is inside an even larger
crater — the moon’s biggest, the South
Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin. Only 12 hours
after arriving, Chang’e-4 released its rover,
Yutu-2, to begin exploring the surrounding
area.
The lander carried a biosphere, a
canister about the length and width of a
human hand, containing a variety of plant
seeds and insect eggs. While pictures
sent to Earth showed cottonseed plants
successfully sprouting, the container
apparently failed to warm properly against
the frigid lunar night, and the experiment
died after just nine days, instead of the
planned 100.
The rest of the mission has proceeded
smoothly. The rover outlived its planned
three-month lifespan, and the lander looks
set to finish out its yearlong mission. Both
are continuing to take plenty of pictures,
and are also probing the ground with
radar and other tools to analyze
the interaction of the lunar
surface with the sun’s output.
And in May, scientists
announced that Chang’e-
may have discovered
rocks originating deep
below the moon’s
surface, in the lunar
mantle, which would
confirm a longstanding
theory: The impact that
created the SPA basin
struck hard enough to punch
through our satellite’s crust into
the liquid mantle below.
India Almost
Returns to
the Moon
On July 22, the
Indian Space Research
Organisation (ISRO) launched
its second lunar mission,
Chandrayaan-2. Chandrayaan-
explored the moon in 2008, sending down
an impactor to crash on the lunar south
pole and fling up dust for investigation.
As a follow-up, Chandrayaan-2 was
designed to map and study the geology of
the moon’s south pole. But, to the dismay
of scientists, the Vikram lander and its
rover, Pragyan, were damaged in a rough
landing on the lunar surface in early
September.
Vikram and Pragyan were scheduled to
reach the moon Sept. 6, but the crew lost
contact as the spacecraft descended into
the lunar atmosphere. They learned a day
later that the spacecraft had crash-landed.
ISRO attempted to establish contact with
the lander and its rover, to no avail. The
crew believes that errors in the automatic
landing programming led to the mission’s
downfall, according to reports by the
Times of India.
Vikram and Pragyan were designed to
explore farther south than any previous
moon missions. Their success would have
made India the fourth nation to soft-land
on the lunar surface, the same accolade
Israel narrowly missed out on earlier
in the year. But for now, it seems those
milestones may be many moons away.