China’s Chang’e-6 spacecraft successfully landed inside the Apollo Crater in the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken Basin at 6:23 a.m. CST Sunday (June 2). The goal of this mission is to collect various rocks and soil from this region for the first time ever.
China hopes the lander can be used to extract some of the Moon’s oldest rocks from a huge crater on its South Pole. It will spend up to three days collecting materials from the surface in an operation that would involve many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty.
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The Chang’e-6 mission is the first human sampling and return mission from the far side of the moon. It involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty. Compared with the Chang’e-5 mission that will achieve the sampling and return from the front side of the moon in 2020, the Chang’e-6 mission has made breakthroughs in the design and control technology of the lunar retrograde orbit, and will, with the support of the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, complete key technical nodes such as intelligent and rapid sampling from the far side of the moon, and takeoff and ascent from the far side of the moon,” said the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
