Here’s another “as never seen before” moment in our space adventures. China’s National Space administration has released hundreds of photos from its unmanned moon expedition that began two years ago, revealing the stark, dusty, rocky and cratered surface of the earth’s satellite in true colour and high definition.
The Chang’e 3 spacecraft successfully soft-landed on the moon’s surface in December 14, 2013 making China the third country after the US and Russia to accomplish the feat. The lander deployed its Yutu or “Jade Rabbit” that was supposed to conduct geologic exploration of the moon’s surface. But the rover a experienced mechanical failure after 42 days due to extremely low lunar night temperatures and lost its mobility. The cold didn’t, however, hamper its picture taking abilities and the rover and lander transmitted photos and data back to earth for till March last year. While the rover took snaps with its panoramic camera, the lander itself captures sights on the moon with its terrain camera.
Last week, China made the Chang’e 3 lander data public and The Planetary Society blogger Emily Lakdawalla downloaded several of these images from the China government’s Planetary Data System website and also gladdened the hearts of many space geeks by creating composite images from some of the taken by Chang’e 3 and Yutu.
Here are some of those spectacular photos of the moonscape.
Despite the setbacks with Yutu China is busy forging ahead with robotic space exploration and, unlike the United States that has set it sights steadfastly on Mars, China is continuing to reach for the moon. The Chang’e 1 and 2 missions were lunar orbiters, Chang’e 3 landed on the moon and with Chang’e 4 planned for 2018 China land to land on the dark side of the moon. This part of the moon is never visible from the earth due to a phenomenon called tidal locking. Tidal forces from the earth have slowed the moons rotation to match its orbit keeping one face of the moon always on the far side.
Early in January, the Chinese Lunar Exploration program also announced a public competition to send a small payload on the Chang’e 4 lander. Space bloggers say that they are noticing an effort in the Chinese space program to make the space robotics missions more accessible to the public and the release of the Chang’e 3 and Yutu photos maybe part of that new outreach.
