Deborah Byrd reported that more space history this week, besides the smallest space object ever orbited, and the most distant object yet visited. Last night, according to clocks in the Americas – January 3, 2019, at 02:26 UTC (10:26 a.m. Beijing time; January 2 at 10:26 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast) – China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft successfully landed on the moon’s far side. Chinese state media announced the event. The spacecraft landed in Von Kármán crater, located on the lunar far side within the South Pole-Aitken basin. Jason Davis at the Planetary Society wrote:
Chang’e-4 itself launched on December 8, 2018. It entered lunar orbit four days later, where mission controllers spent 22 days testing the spacecraft’s systems, waiting for the sun to rise at the landing site. [On January 2-3, 2019] Chang’e-4 successfully de-orbited and landed. Scientists say Chang’e-4’s landing site is an area where an ancient impact by space debris pounded the moon long ago, possibly exposing some of the lunar mantle, the layer beneath its crust. So it’s an interesting region geologically. Chinese scientists hope to learn more about the early history of our moon (and by extension the Earth and rest of the solar system) by studying this region via Chang’e-4.
The spacecraft is a combination lander-rover. At this writing, there’s no word that the rover has been deployed, but that’s expected soon. Stay tuned!
Just in, Change'e 4 has also brought to the Moon plants and animals in a small container seeds of potatoes and rockcress (Arabidopsis thaliana, a flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard, as well as a model organism for plant biology), as well as silkworm eggs. the plants will support the silkworms with oxygen, and the silkworms will in turn provide the plants with necessary carbon dioxide and nutrients through their waste. The researchers will watch the plants carefully to see whether the plants successfully perform photosynthesis, and grow and bloom in the lunar environment (more).
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