June 2024 will be very busy for space exploration. After a decade of development, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft has successfully transported astronauts. At the same time, SpaceX's giant Starship spacecraft, which is preparing to land on the moon, also completed a successful test and returned to land autonomously. Meanwhile, in the new space race of the 21st century, China, a rival to the United States, has sent a space probe alongside the moon, which is not always shadowed, but is not visible from Earth.
Chang'o-6 landed and took samples from the lunar surface. Its return module successfully boarded with the samples and rendezvoused with the mission vehicle, which is currently on its way home.
The mission itself is a historical precedent: the Chinese probe is the first to bring a sample from the far side of the moon. However, there are other precedents regarding international cooperation.
Welcome to Apollo!
Chang'u-6 landed on June 2 in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon's south pole, a huge impact crater with a diameter of 2,500 kilometers. The landing site was Apollo, a crater in the SPA crater – Apollo itself has additional, smaller craters named after participants in the US lunar program of the same name.
According to the Outer Space Treaty, no country can claim its own territory on the Moon. In the case of Apollo Crater, the symbolism of the names may not have been incidental, but only secondary. In sum, according to forecasts, a large amount of water can be found in this area, which is crucial for the development of space exploration and the establishment of a human base. According to Chinese specialists working on the program, the Apollo Crater is an ideal target because its smooth surface makes landing easier.
Before Chang'o-6, only one spacecraft had landed on the far side of the Moon: Chang'o-4 in 2019. We don't often bring samples home from the Moon either: the last sample was also delivered by Chang'o , Chang'o-5, four years ago. This shows how seriously China is working on the lunar space program.
Hufnagel syndrome
The first interesting fact is that the Chinese Space Agency announced a tender to its international partners in 2018, where it was possible to enter the mission with its own scientific instrument with a payload of up to 10 kilograms. In the end, four winners were announced. Pakistani experts sent a small Cubesat satellite to orbit the moon and measure its magnetic field. Meanwhile, landing instruments were selected from countries affiliated with the European Space Agency. The French sent an instrument to measure gases and water escaping from the lunar soil, the Italians sent a reflective ranging system, and the Swedes sent an instrument to measure ions on the lunar surface aboard Chang'u-6.
Details of the latter were only recently known, although the Chang'o-6 repatriation module is still on its way and is scheduled to land in Inner Mongolia on June 25.
While Chang'o-6 spent 48 hours on the surface searching and sampling, NILS (Negative Ion on the Lunar Surface), specifically named in Sweden, measured negative ions on the surface of the celestial body. The moon is a celestial body that has no atmosphere or magnetic field, and its surface is constantly bombarded by solar winds. It is an environmental effect that produces secondary molecules and differently charged ions. However, negative ions are short-lived and cannot leave the surface – and measurements of them have now been obtained for the first time.
This was the first time that ESA instruments were able to make measurements on the surface of the Moon and the first time that scientific work was carried out in cooperation with China.
In a separate opinion piece, the state-run South China Morning Post praised cooperation between China and the West and noted that Western scientists could also benefit from the samples being returned.
The European Space Agency is present in the new space race, not as a competitor, but as a participant, since within the framework of the US-led Artemis program, Airbus is manufacturing the service modules for the Orion spacecraft in Germany (this is the part of the spacecraft) that moves with the crew capsule. , but it is no longer in its role of re-entry into the atmosphere). The European Space Agency is also involved in building the Gateway space station. It will be much smaller than the International Space Station, but it will not be in low Earth orbit. Rather, it will orbit parallel to the Moon and serve missions there.
Despite the serious commitments, the European Space Agency seems to have been somewhat caught between two seats, and although they wanted to send a European astronaut to the Moon as quickly as possible, in the end, out of international diplomatic considerations, America chose the Japanese as the best ones. friend. According to experts interviewed by POLITICO, the fact that Europe's fragmentation makes it difficult for the Paris-based ESA to make independent decisions on greater cooperation played a role in this, and it hasn't helped that different European countries have been unable to act unified to ratify the international agreement. About Artemis too.
At the same time, the American decision is primarily aimed at China: no matter how much they hide in the Apollo crater, there is a good chance that the first Asian astronaut will arrive on the neighboring planet not from them, but from Japan.
(And the, POLITICO, Space.com website)
(Cover Photo: Pictured is the lunar lander of the Chang'e-6 mission at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern China's Hainan Province on May 3, 2024. Photograph: Hector Retamal/AFP)
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