Sudeep Singh
21 July, 2015:
China is planning to become the first nation to land on the far side of the moon. They want it to be a stepping stone to eventually having a manned lunar base on the surface.
The far side of the Moon is the hemisphere of the Moon that always faces away from Earth. The far side’s terrain is rugged, with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat lunar maria. It has one of the largest craters in the Solar System, the South Pole–Aitken basin.
In the early 1970s, astronaut Jack Schmitt strongly petitioned NASA to land the Apollo 17 mission on the far side of the moon but it was to no avail. Now, more than 40 years later, China is planning to achieve this goal in 2018 or 2019.
The stationary lander and rover will jointly be called Chang’e 4, a successor to the Change’e 3 mission which touched down on 14 December 2013. They said that, the Change’e 4 probe lander and rover will have the same technical status with the Change’e 3 but the exploration will be redesigned and the payload will be reconfigured.
China’s Chang’e 3 Moon Rover
For this mission, the lander will be accompanied by an orbiting relay satellite in the Earth–Moon Lagrange point 2 (L2) position, into which China sent a test spacecraft last year. As the Moon is tidally locked to Earth and the far side of the Moon never comes into view, which means all the communication must be done via a relay satellite.
China has its desire to cooperate with other nations. It may be involved in a future Mars mission and now it is considering partnering with ESA (European Space Agency) for lunar missions. ESA itself has proposed building a ‘lunar village’ recently.
