Tangermann reported in late 2020 that China’s lunar lander Chang’e-5 just beamed back color photos of the surface of the Moon — and they’re a lot more, well, beige than what you’d expect. The spacecraft landed on the near side of the Moon earlier this week. Just hours after touchdown, the lander jumped into action, scooping up lunar soil to bring back home. It also took the opportunity to photograph its surroundings and send back incredible images, which were later stitched together into a gorgeous color panorama that will challenge your preconceptions about the Moon’s hue.
Color Setting
The Moon’s surface isn’t actually the dingy grayscale seen in Apollo-era photographs. Images taken by the cameras on board NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have shown a bluish tint in the past, and color composites made up of satellite images show a slightly red tint. The surface’s appearance can change drastically depending on how the Sun shines upon it. Accounts from Apollo astronauts described a number of different colors, from “chocolate brown” on the day side to “pale blue” on the night side, as Air & Space magazine reported back in 2009. And that’s without getting into how cameras, and the technology used to process their images, can affect our perception of lunar images.
Western Plains
The image also shows the lander’s landing feet dug into the soft, sand-like material in the Oceanus Procellarum region, a vast plain on the western edge of the near side of the Moon. The geological features in the area are thought to be billions of years younger than the sites where the lunar samples were collected throughout NASA’s Apollo missions in the 1970s. On Wednesday, officials also released footage of the lander touching down, showing the small craft zooming over countless craters of various sizes.
An ascent vehicle attached to the top of Chang’e-5 will deliver the lunar samples collected by the lander back into lunar orbit in the following days. The vehicle is expected to make its way back to Earth with samples in tow some time in mid-December.
As an update, China's Chang'e 5 mission to the moon has left the Moon in its rearview. China's National Space Administration announced that its ascent module had blasted off from atop the lander, carrying samples of rock and soil it drilled and scooped from the lunar surface. The mission blasted off from China on Nov. 23 and landed on the moon just two days ago, on Tuesday. Video clips from Chinese media making the rounds show the lander's robotic arm and drill hard at work during its short shift on another world.
During its stay, the spacecraft also sent back the above massive panoramic view from its post on a lunar plain of relatively young volcanic moon rock. The image above is just about half of the full high-resolution shot, which shows both distant hills from the lander's vantage point and also how the feet of the craft dug into the soft, gravel-like surface of the moon on touchdown Tuesday. (Download the whole file here.) Zooming in around the foot of the lander in particular provides a real sense of the desolate, dry, desert-like terrain.
Images purported to be from the mission have also been shared on Chinese social media, showing hundreds of images taken during the descent and landing stitched together into a single time-lapse video: https://weibo.com/3922221653/JwCyvrUmm?ssl_rnd=1607797142.7824&type=comment
After the ascent module docks with a waiting orbiter above the moon, it'll return for a landing in China in mid-December, where the samples will be collected and studied. This marks the first such sample return from the moon since the 1970s.
The China National Space Administration says the Chang'e 5 lander will drill into the lunar surface "to collect underground rocks" and use a mechanical arm to scoop up samples of surface soil. The ascent probe will lift about 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of samples from the moon's surface for transport back to Earth. The sample is expected to land on Dec. 15 in Inner Mongolia, where it will be collected for study.
The Soviets were the last to bring lunar dirt back home, with the Luna 24 mission in 1976.
Chang'e 5 gets its name from the Chinese moon goddess and follows the Chang'e 4 mission, which sent a lander and rover to the far side of the moon, where they've been taking some interesting photos for almost two years now. For more on the landing by China, see (more).
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