China Outer Space Science, Technology and Explorations: News & Updates

[JSCh]

China's Chang'e-4 probe changes orbit to prepare for moon-landing
Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-30 10:13:07|Editor: Yang Yi


BEIJING, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- China's Chang'e-4 probe entered a planned orbit Sunday morning to prepare for the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced.

The probe has entered an elliptical lunar orbit with the perilune at about 15 km and the apolune at about 100 km at 8:55 a.m. Beijing Time, said CNSA.

Since the Chang'e-4 entered the lunar orbit on Dec. 12, the ground control center in Beijing has trimmed the probe's orbit twice, and tested the communication link between the probe and the relay satellite Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, which is operating in the halo orbit around the second Lagrangian (L2) point of the earth-moon system.

The space engineers also checked the imaging instruments and ranging detectors on the probe to prepare for the landing.

The control center will choose a proper time to land the probe on the far side of the moon, according to CNSA.

The Chang'e-4 probe, including a lander and a rover, was launched by a Long March-3B carrier rocket on Dec. 8 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

 

[JSCh]

From CASC, Video of compilation of all 37 launches of 2018.

--> 中国航天科技集团的微博视频
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Long version video of all 39 launch --> 燃！2018中国航天发射集锦 39次发射全记录【无配乐版】_哔哩哔哩 (゜-゜)つロ 干杯~-bilibili

 

[JSCh]

 

[Darwin]

China's Chang'e-4 probe changes orbit to prepare for moon-landing
Source: Xinhua| 2018-12-30 10:13:07|Editor: Yang Yi


BEIJING, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- China's Chang'e-4 probe entered a planned orbit Sunday morning to prepare for the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced.

The probe has entered an elliptical lunar orbit with the perilune at about 15 km and the apolune at about 100 km at 8:55 a.m. Beijing Time, said CNSA.

Since the Chang'e-4 entered the lunar orbit on Dec. 12, the ground control center in Beijing has trimmed the probe's orbit twice, and tested the communication link between the probe and the relay satellite Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge, which is operating in the halo orbit around the second Lagrangian (L2) point of the earth-moon system.

The space engineers also checked the imaging instruments and ranging detectors on the probe to prepare for the landing.

The control center will choose a proper time to land the probe on the far side of the moon, according to CNSA.

The Chang'e-4 probe, including a lander and a rover, was launched by a Long March-3B carrier rocket on Dec. 8 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Landing is planned for tomorrow. Hope its telecast live.

 

[JSCh]

林晓弈
5分钟前 来自 航爱网牌Android 已编辑
嫦娥四号月球探测器于今天上午10点26分成功软着陆，成功了！航天爱好者网祝贺！！

林晓弈
5 min ago.
Chang'e 4 has successfully perform soft landing at 10:26 am on the far side of the moon. Congratulation!!

 

[cirr]

Chang'e 4 has landed!

 

[JSCh]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1080655563321536512

Scott Tilley‏ @coastal8049
Scott Tilley Retweeted Andrew Jones

The landing time is highly credible and well within the landing window for the orbit we have modelled.

Scott Tilley added,

Andrew Jones @AJ_FI
Lots of noise that Chang'e-4 has landed successfully (with a time of 10:26 Beijing time/02:26 UTC being given). Waiting for something official.
10:42 AM - 3 Jan 2019

It is official !!!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1080659214282838017

CGTN‏ Verified account @CGTNOfficial 2m2 minutes ago
#BREAKING #China's Chang'e-4 probe lands successfully on far side of the moon, marking the first ever soft-landing in this uncharted area

 

[JSCh]

Reported now on CCTV.

China's Chang'e-4 probe soft-lands on moon's far side
Source: Xinhua| 2019-01-03 12:15:36|Editor: ZX


BEIJING, Jan. 3 (Xinhua) -- China's Chang'e-4 probe touched down on the far side of the moon Thursday, becoming the first spacecraft soft-landing on the moon's uncharted side never visible from Earth.

The probe, comprising a lander and a rover, landed at the preselected landing area at 177.6 degrees east longitude and 45.5 degrees south latitude on the far side of the moon at 10:26 a.m. Beijing Time, the China National Space Administration announced.

 

[JSCh]

China's Chang'e-4 probe has returned the world's first close shot of the far side of the moon via the Queqiao relay satellite after it touched down Thursday

上图为嫦娥四号着陆器监视相机C拍摄的着陆点南侧月球背面图像，巡视器将朝此方向驶向月球表面。
The picture above shows the image of the far side of the moon on the south side of the landing point taken by the Chang'e 4 Lander Surveillance Camera C. The rover will drive towards the surface of the Moon in this direction.

From CLEP (Chinese Lunar Exploration Program), first picture is taken during powered descent by the lander, second picture is taken right after landing.

 

[Maxpane]

 

[JSCh]

Breathtaking 12 minutes for Chang'e-4's landing
Source: Xinhua| 2019-01-03 14:05:57|Editor: zh


BEIJING, Jan. 3 (Xinhua) -- Over about 12 dramatic minutes, China's Chang'e-4 probe descended and softly touched down on a crater on the far side of the moon on Thursday.

Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program, said Chang'e-3 landed on the Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, on the moon's near side, which is as flat as the north China plain, while the landing site of Chang'e-4 is as rugged as the high mountains and lofty hills of southwest China's Sichuan Province.

Chinese space experts chose the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin as the landing site of Chang'e-4. The area available for the landing is only one eighth of that for Chang'e-3, and is surrounded by mountains as high as 10 km.

Unlike the parabolic curve of Chang'e-3's descent trajectory, Chang'e-4 made an almost vertical landing, said Wu.

"It was a great challenge with the short time, high difficulty and risks," Wu said.

The whole process was automatic with no intervention from ground control, but the relay satellite transmitted images of the landing process back to Earth, he said.

"We chose a vertical descent strategy to avoid the influence of the mountains on the flight track," said Zhang He, executive director of the Chang'e-4 probe project, from the China Academy of Space Technology.

Li Fei, one of the designers of the lander, said when the process began, an engine was ignited to lower the craft's relative velocity from 1.7 km per second to close to zero, and the probe's attitude was adjusted to face the moon and descend vertically.

When it descended to an altitude of about 2 km, its cameras took pictures of the lunar surface so the probe could identify large obstacles such as rocks or craters, said Wu Xueying, deputy chief designer of the Chang'e-4 probe.

At 100 meters above the surface, it hovered to identify smaller obstacles and measure the slopes on the lunar surface, Wu said.

After calculation, the probe found the safest site, and continued its descent. When it was 2 meters above the surface, the engine stopped, and the spacecraft landed with four legs cushioning against the shock.

 

[JSCh]

NEWS | 03 JANUARY 2019
China becomes first nation to land on the Moon's far side
Chang’e-4 will explore uncharted territory on the lunar surface.

Chang’e-4’s rover will map the area surrounding the landing site.Credit: Xinhua via Zuma​

A Chinese probe has made a historic touch-down on the far side of the Moon, according to the country's state-run media. It is the first time a probe has visited the region, 60 years after an orbiter gave humans their first look at the area.

Chang’e-4 reportedly landed inside the Von Kármán Crater at 2:26 UTC on 3 January.

As the Moon's far side is permanently hidden from Earth, the news of Chang’e-4's successful landing was relayed by a spacecraft called Queqiao. It has been circling around a gravitationally stable point about 60,000 kilometres beyond the Moon since it launched in May.

The far side landing location also meant that during the final phases of the approach, Chang’e-4 was on its own, and could not be operated remotely. Starting from an altitude of 15 kilometres, the probe used a rocket booster to brake and briefly hover. Meanwhile, an on-board camera and a laser ranging system scanned the terrain to avoid boulders.

The Chinese space programme has kept many details about the mission secret — including the planned timing of the landing — even from scientists who collaborated with it. Robert Wimmer-Schweingruber, a physicist at the University of Kiel in Germany who has a radiation-detection experiment on the lander, said that he expected to find out about the landing from Chinese news sites.

Chang’e-4 launched on 8 December and entered a highly elongated lunar orbit 4 days later. It then maneuvered itself into a lower orbit. Mission management reportedly selected a landing site inside the relatively flat, 186-km-wide Von Kármán Crater. It sits inside the much larger South Pole-Aitken Basin.

Unexplored territory
The 2,500 kilometre-wide basin is thought to be the oldest of the Moon’s large, deep impact basins, and it is the only such feature on the orb’s far side. Studying the basin has long been a top priority in Solar-System studies. It is thought to have formed when a large asteroid hit the Moon towards the beginning of the Late Heavy Bombardment, around 3.8 billion years ago. An accurate dating of the basin’s formation could reveal whether this epoch of battering — which must have affected Earth as well as the Moon — stretched over hundreds of millions of years or was concentrated in a relatively brief time.

After the successful Moon landings in the 1970s, some began to take a “been there, done that” view of the Moon, says Jeffrey Taylor, a lunar scientist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. But China’s venture to the far side shows otherwise, he says. “We have not done it all or gone everywhere on the Moon.” Still, solving the mysteries of lunar history will require collecting samples and returning them to Earth for analysis, he adds.

Because the Moon’s rotation around its axis is precisely synchronized with its orbit owing to ‘tidal locking’, humans had no idea what the far side of the Moon looked like until the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 probe sent back the first shots of it in 1959. Luna 3 revealed a region pockmarked by many more craters than the near side — and virtually devoid of the ‘maria’, or seas of solidified lava, which dominate the familiar near side. (Apollo 11 landed on one such mare, the Sea of Tranquility.)

In the following decades, other probes followed up with detailed topographical and gravimetric mapping of the full lunar surface, but no craft has landed on the far side until now. Studying the region from up close could provide clues to why it is so different.

“The Chang’e-4 mission is an historic step in the Chinese lunar exploration programme and in international scientific exploration of the Moon," says Jim Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a veteran of NASA’s Apollo programme. The mission will open up the ‘Luna Incognita’ — the unknown Moon — to surface exploration for the first time, he says.

Chang’e-4 and its 6-wheeled rover carry instruments that will do a range of experiments, including radio measurements of the early Universe; a study of the radiation environment of the lunar surface, led by Wimmer-Schweingruber; deep scans with a ground-penetrating radar; and analyses of the geology of the surface with an imaging spectrometer. Chang’e 4 also carries a small, climate-controlled environment with potato and Arabidopsis seeds and silkworm cocoons.

Chang’e-4 and its rover were originally built as a backup to the previous lunar mission, Chang’e-3, which went successfully in 2013. China’s next Moon trip, Chang’e-5, will aim to return a sample of lunar rock to Earth, and is due to launch later this year.

doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07796-x


China becomes first nation to land on the Moon's far side | Nature

 

[LKJ86]

It will be launched by Long March-11 rocket on January 21, 2019.

 

[JSCh]

Chang'e 4's rover name is Yutu no. 2. From the rover official weibo account name change,
月球车玉兔二号
今天 13:44 来自 微博 weibo.com
#嫦娥四号任务# 我到了！看，这是着陆点南侧，我要去的方向。现在四姐还抱着我，但真想赶快出去走走啊～

• 

https://twitter.com/x/status/1080824547430023169

https://twitter.com/x/status/1080835124860604421

A picture of Yutu II from CLEP

 

[JSCh]

月球车玉兔二号
4分钟前
谁在叫我？以后，“玉兔二号”就是我的名字了。
这也是师父们@中国探月工程 最喜欢的名字。

2014年1月25日，前辈@月球车玉兔 说自己“遇到了一点问题”，大家都担心坏了。我们是中国自主研发的月球车，研制过程没有任何经验可循。前辈的经历很惊险，但也是宝贵的第一手经验。

我要去的月球背面环境更恶劣，所以师父们对我进行了升级改造：

减少露在外面的电缆，抵抗巨大的温差，还在运动安全、能源供给、科学探测、测控通信等方面作了很多特殊设计。

现在，我可以爬20度的坡，翻越200毫米的障碍，肩膀上的太阳能帆板也用了更好的材料。

我准备好了。

Lunar rover Yutu II
11 minutes ago

Who is calling me? From now on, Yutu II is my name.
This is also the favorite name of masters of CLEP.

On January 25, 2014, my predecessor Yutu said that he "had encountered a problem" and everyone was worried about it. We are lunar rover independently developed by China. There is no experience in the development process. The experience of the masters is very stirring, but it is also a valuable first-hand experience.

The environment on the back of the moon I am going to is worse, so the masters upgraded me:

Reducing the cable exposed outside, improve the huge temperature difference resistance, and doing a lot of special design in movement safety, energy supply, scientific sensing, measurement and control communication.

Now, I can climb a 20-degree slope, climb over a 200-mm barrier, and use better materials for the solar panels on my shoulders.

I'm ready.