Blog

China’s Chang’e-6 unmanned spacecraft landed on the far side of the moon on Sunday, in a historic mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the unexplored place on the lunar surface. According to the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the craft landed on a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on Sunday at 6.23 am Beijing time.

China launched the mission on May 3 with the aim of collecting some of the oldest rocks from the impact crater for the first time in history.

The Asian giant is the only country to have reached the far side of the moon twice till date — the last mission was in 2019 with the Chang’e-4 spacecraft.

The CNSA said the “lander-ascender combination began the powered descent at 6.09 am”, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

“During the descent, an autonomous visual obstacle avoidance system was used to automatically detect obstacles, with a visible light camera selecting a comparatively safe landing area based on the brightness and darkness of the lunar surface,” Xinhua quoted the space agency as saying in a statement.

WATCH THE MOMENT CHANG’E-6 LANDED ON MOON’S FAR SIDE

The CNSA further said that the “combination then hovered about 100 meters above the safe landing area and used a laser 3D scanner to detect obstacles on the lunar surface to select the final landing site before a slow vertical descent”.

“As the combination approached the lunar surface, it shut down the engine and touched down via free fall, protected by a cushioning system.”

The Chang’e-6 spacecraft consists of an orbiter, a returner, a lander and an ascender. If all goes as planned, the mission will provide China with a pristine record of the moon’s 4.5 billion-year history and yield new clues on the solar system’s formation, reports Reuters news agency.

It will also allow for an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region with the moon’s better understood Earth-facing side.

The South Pole–Aitken basin is one of the largest known in the solar system.

The back of the moon perpetually faces away from the Earth and is dotted with deep and dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations more challenging.