China has launched a mission on Friday to collect samples from the far side of the moon, for the first time in the world, raising Washington’s alarm at the pace of Beijing’s space advancements.
An uncrewed rocket carrying the Chang’e-6 probe blasted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Island. The mission will last for 53 days. It is tasked with landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon, which faces away from the Earth, to retrieve rocks and soil samples to Earth for analysis.
A New Accomplishment
The launch marks a new milestone in China’s ambitious lunar and space program, reported Reuters. Pierre-Yves Meslin, a French researcher working on one of the scientific objectives of the Chang’e-6 mission, said: “It is a bit of a mystery to us how China has been able to develop such an ambitious and successful program in such a short time.”
China made its first unmanned landing on the far side of the moon in 2018, through Chang’e-4 probe. In 2020, its Chang’e-5 succeeded in collecting lunar samples for the first time in 44 years. Chang’e-6 could make China the first country to retrieve lunar samples from the far side of the moon.
Exploring Mysteries
Scientists, diplomats and space agency officials from France, Italy, Pakistan, and the European space Agency (ESA) attended the launch, as all of them have moon-studying payloads aboard Chang’e-6. The US law bans China from collaborating with the US space agency, NASA, so no US organizations applied to get a payload spot aboard the mission.
Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at ESA working with Chinese researchers on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads, said: “The far side of the moon has a mystique perhaps because we literally can’t see it, we have never seen it apart from with robotic probes or the very few number of humans that have been around the other side.”
Chang’e-6, after separating from the rocket, will take four to five days to reach the orbit and will land on the moon in early June. Upon landing, the probe will embark on digging up 2 kg of samples before returning to Earth. The duration for collecting samples on the far side is estimated at 14 hours, compared to 21 hours for the near side.
Scientists hope the samples could answer questions about a significant period of solar system activity billions of years ago. Samples brought by Chang’e-5 enabled Chinese scientists to discover new details about the moon, including accurately dating the timespan of volcanic activity on the moon.
Ge Ping, deputy director of the China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) Lunar Exploration and Space Program, expected Chang’e-6 to determine the geological age of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, which his team estimates at 4 billion years, much older than the samples brought by the Soviet Union and the US, which were about 3 billion years old, and the samples brought by the Chang’e-5, which were 2 billion years old.
Ambitious Project
Chang’e-6 is part of an ambitious long-term project to establish a permanent research station on the moon by 2035, the China and Russia-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). This station will allow China and its partners to perform deep space exploration activities.
James Carpenter, head of the ESA’s lunar science office, said: “We know that the moon may have resources that could become useful in the future, so the European Space Agency, NASA, the Chinese agency and others around the world are going to the moon.”
According to BBC, Chang’e-6 is the first of three uncrewed missions to the moon planned by China this decade. Chang’e-7 will explore the south pole for water, while Chang’e-8 will try to set the stage for building the ILRS.
China aims to have put its first astronauts on the moon, and to have sent probes to collect samples from Mars and Jupiter by 2030.
Heated Race
This launch comes as an increasing number of countries eye the strategic and scientific benefits of lunar exploration. Last year, India landed its first spacecraft on the moon, becoming the fourth nation to achieve this accomplishment, while Russia’s first lunar mission in decades, Luna 25, crashed into the moon’s surface.
In January, Japan became the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon. In February, NASA-funded mission, IM-1, landed close to the South Pole, reported CNN.
The head of NASA, Bill Nelson, called the US-China competition a “new space race,” raising concerns over China’s ambitions. He told lawmakers last month: “We believe that a lot of their so-called civilian space program is a military program. I think in effect we are in a race.”
Dr Svetla Ben-Itzhak, deputy director of Johns Hopkins University’s West Space Scholars Program, told the Guardian: “On a geopolitical level, China’s space ambitions raise questions about how it might leverage its space capabilities to further its regional and domestic political and military interests.”
China’s advances in space have become “cause for concern,” according to General Stephen Whiting of the US Space Command who noted that Beijing had tripled the number of spy satellites in orbit over the last six years.
Resource Monopoly
Professor Kazuto Suzuki, of the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo, believed that the US-China race is about finding and controlling resources, such as water. He said: “It’s a race for who has better technical capabilities. China is quickly catching up. The pace of Chinese technological development is the threatening element [to the US].”
“Generally speaking, China wants to be first so they have the right to dominate and monopolize the resources. If you have the resources in your hand then you have a huge advantage in the future of space exploration,” he added.
