Over the past few years, competing countries have turned the Moon into a hotspot for activities not seen since Apollo 17 astronauts departed the lunar surface in 1972.
In a lunar region, Japan’s “Moon Sniper” mission overcame the odds and survived three long, cold lunar nights since its side landing on January 19. Engineers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency did not design the spacecraft to last through a lunar night, a two-week period of freezing darkness, but Moon Sniper continues to thrive amid lunar extremes and send back new images of its landing site.
Elsewhere, an international team of astronomers believes it is located in a crater created a few million years ago when something huge crashed into the lunar surface – and sent a chunk crashing to the far side of the Moon, or the side facing away. of the Earth, flinging him away from the Earth.
The chunk of Moon has become a rare quasi-satellite, or asteroid that orbits close to Earth. The Tianwen-2 mission will visit the space rock later this decade. But first, China decided to return to the “far side” of the Moon.
Lunar update
The Chang’e-6 mission, launched Friday, aims to bring back the first samples from the South Pole-Aitken basin, or the oldest and largest crater on the moon. Since the Chang’e 4 mission in 2019, China remains the only country to have landed on the far side of the Moon, sometimes called the “dark side” of the Moon. The “dark side” of the Moon is actually a misnomerexperts say, and the remote lunar hemisphere does receive illumination – but scientists simply don’t know as much about the region as they would like.
The far side, with its thicker crust, is very different from the near side that was explored during the Apollo missions.
Scientists hope that returning samples from the far side could solve some of the biggest remaining lunar mysteries, including the true origin of the Moon.
Share:
