US media: NASA photographed the Chang'e-6 landing site on the far side of the moon for the first time

Globe.com

2024-06-19 06:11Posted on the official account of Shaanxi Global Network

According to a report by the US "Space" website on the 18th, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) photographed the landing site of China's Chang'e-6 lunar probe on the far side of the moon for the first time.

At 6:23 a.m. on June 2, the Chang'e-6 lander and ascender assembly successfully pre-selected a landing area in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon with the support of the Queqiao-2 relay satellite. On June 7, the LROC spotted the Chang'e-6 lander on the far side of the moon, which appears in the photo as a small bright cluster. The LROC team calculated the landing site coordinates at 41.6385 degrees north latitude and 206.0148 degrees east longitude of the moon, with an altitude of 5,256 meters relative to the average lunar surface.

The Chang'e-6 lander photographed by LROC

The LROC team also described in the report that the increase in the brightness of the terrain around the Chang'e-6 lander was due to the violent jets blown away by the lander's engine when it started blowing away nearby lunar dust, similar to the situation around other lunar landers.

The LROC team also released photos of the same area taken on March 3, 2022, to show the changes before and after the Chang'e-6 landing and to highlight the probe's presence on the lunar surface.

According to the report, the Chang'e-6 landing site is located on the southern edge of the Apollo Basin on the far side of the moon, which is an "ocean" of cooled volcanic rocks. American planetary scientist James Head said that the front and back sides of the moon are very different, and the rock samples brought back by Chang'e-6 may provide clues to the origin of this discrepancy. "This will be an international treasure trove of information for space planetary scientists," Hade said. ”

The Chang'e-6 probe was launched from Hainan on May 3 with the goal of bringing lunar samples from the far side of the moon back to Earth for the first time in history. After completing the collection of lunar samples, the ascender took off with lunar samples on June 4 and entered a predetermined orbit around the moon. Two days later, the ascent vehicle successfully docked with the orbiter and returner assembly in lunar orbit and transferred the lunar sample container to the returner. At present, the orbiter and returner combination are on a circumlunar flight, waiting for an opportunity to return to Earth.

The official Weibo account of the Chang'e-6 lunar probe said on the 15th that "the mysterious package from the moon is being transported, and the current transportation progress is 30%+". It is expected that the returner will carry lunar samples and land at the Siziwangqi space landing site around the 25th.

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