China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover lands on moon’s far side, sends back images |ForumIAS

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China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover made the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon

Important Facts:

The first-ever soft landing is being seen as a major milestone in space exploration because unlike previous moon missions that have landed on the Earth-facing side.
A Soviet satellite took the first photographs of the far side in 1959, and the Apollo missions circled above it between 1968 and 1972 but this is the first time any craft has landed on the unexplored and rugged far side of the moon
Objective of the Chang’e-4 mission include surveying the terrain and landforms, detecting the mineral composition, shallow lunar surface structure and measuring the neutron radiation and neutral atoms to study the environment
The probe was launched by a Long March-3B carrier rocket on December 8 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan Province and It landed on the Von Karman crater in the South Pole-Aitken basin
The Aitken basin, where Chang’e 4 has landed, is the Moon’s largest and oldest impact crater
China launched a relay satellite, named Queqiao, in May, to set up a communication link between the Earth and Chang’e-4 lunar probe.
The far side of the moon is the hemisphere that never faces Earth, due to the moon’s rotation. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the “dark side of the moon,
Chang’e 4 is the fourth lunar probe launched by China since the country’s lunar programme started in 2004