China has unveiled a new lunar rover as it prepares to become the first nation in the world to explore the dark side, or the far side, of the moon later this year. The new mission, called Chang’e-4, aims to set a lunar rover and lander on the far side of the moon.
China’s space agency this week shared new details about its upcoming Chang’e-4 mission, which aims to launch two robots to the far side of the moon. The robots will study the geology and chemistry of the moon’s most ancient and mysterious rocks. It will also try to grow plants and worms on the moon.
Light and radio transmissions from Earth to the moon’s far side are blocked. When Apollo astronauts orbited the moon, they temporarily (and expectedly) lost contact with mission control in Houston each time they passed behind the 2,159-mile-wide ball of rock.
But China is already poised to get around this problem – literally – since it successfully launched a precursor mission called Queqiao in May. Queqiao is a telecommunications satellite now parked in a gravity-neutral spot in space, called a Lagrange point, that overlooks the far side of the moon.
Click here for Latest News updates and viral videos on our AI-powered smart news genie