China’s Chang’e 6 mission has successfully delivered the very first samples from the far side of the moon to Earth. But what happened to the lander that collected the lunar material?
Change 6 launched on May 3. The mission consisted of four spacecraft: an orbiter, a lander, an ascent vehicle, and a return capsule. The lander landed in the Apollo crater on June 1, with the main task of scooping and drilling for unique samples from the far side of the moon and loading them into the riser to be shot into lunar orbit.
The samples finally reached Earth on June 25, come down as planned in grasslands in Inner Mongolia.
The Chang’e 6 lander remains on board in the meantime the moon. It carried other payloads, including a panoramic camera and a small rover. Insights into the lander’s fate recently came from the French space agency CNES, which contributed a radon degassing detection payload called DORN to the mission.
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“As planned, DORN was disabled shortly before Chang’e 6 lifted off from the lunar surface, when the ground platform became inactive,” a CNES press attaché said in an email.
The riser explosion likely caused extensive damage to the lander, although it managed to capture images of the event. Accordingly, all activities – including the autonomous deployment of the rover and imaging of the lander – were packed before launch. This included another European instrument which registered previously unnoticed charged particles on the surface of the moon.
If any activities had been conducted after the climber’s launch, they would have stopped over the Apollo crater at nightfall. Unlike the still operational ones Change 3 And Change 4 landers on the near and far sides of the moon respectively, Chang’e 6’s lander did not carry the radioisotope heaters necessary for long-term lunar operations, which requires surviving the deep cold of the long lunar night . The night in Apollo Crater began on June 11, and the sun rose over the site again on June 26.
Meanwhile, the ascent lamp, which carried the samples from the moon to the waiting Chang’e 6 spacecraft in lunar orbit, is now also inoperative. Although Chinese space authorities have not commented on the fate of the ascent lamp, the rocket was likely sent responsibly to the moon after it joined the orbiter and transferred the samples.
Radio amateur Scott Tilley monitored signals from the ascender, with their absence indicating that it had been ordered to crash into the moon.
Quick update on the Chang’e 6 mission. The Ascender was not present today, suggesting it was disabled and ended up on the moon, as CE5s did after the expected mission timeline. The Orbiter is behaving normally and has been in and out with Argentina all day.June 8, 2024
China appears to have issued the sample protocol with its Chang’e 5 mission, which returned samples from the near side of the moon to Earth in late 2020.
After all other aspects were completed, the reentry capsule and the samples inside were transported to Beijing on Wednesday (June 26). The samples will soon be transferred to specially developed facilities for storage, analysis and distribution for research.
Meanwhile, the Queqiao 2 lunar relay satellite, which helped facilitate the sample mission on the other side, will continue to orbit Earth with its scientific payloads. It will support the ongoing Chang’e 4 mission and those to come Change 7 mission, which will target the moon’s south pole around 2026.