China’s Moon Landing: ‘New Chapter in Humanity’s Exploration of the Moon’

By Steven Lee Myers and Zoe Mou

BEIJING — China reached a milestone in space exploration on Thursday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon for the first time in history, the country's space agency announced.

The landing of the probe, called Chang'e-4 after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology, is one in a coming series of missions that underscore the country's ambitions to join — and even lead — the space race.

China landed another rover on the moon in 2013, joining the United States and the Soviet Union as the only nations to have carried out a “soft landing” there, but the Chang'e-4 is the first to touch down on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from the Earth.

The mission “has opened a new chapter in humanity's exploration of the moon,” the China National Space Administration said in an announcement on its website. The agency said the spacecraft landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time at its target on the far side of the moon.

The probe sent back to the earth the first close-up image of the moon's far side using a relay satellite China calls “Queqiao,” or “Magpie Bridge,” the space agency said in a notice that included images it said were taken by the probe.

Although a latecomer by decades to space exploration, China is quickly catching up, experts say, and could challenge the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other fields.

“This space mission shows that China has reached the advanced world-class level in deep space exploration,” said Zhu Menghua, a professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology who has worked closely with the Chinese space agency. “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.”

China now plans to begin fully operating its third space station by 2022, to put astronauts in a lunar base by later in that decade, and to send probes to Mars, including ones that could return samples of the Martian surface back to Earth.

Though the moon is hardly untrodden ground after decades of exploration, a new landing is far more than just a propaganda coup, experts say.

Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/world/asia/china-change-4-moon.html