Next stop, the moon (Image: CNSA)

Update, 2 December 2013: China’s Chang’e-3 moon mission successfully launched on Sunday at 1730 GMT on board a Long March 3B rocket. The probe is set to reach the moon on 6 December before touching down on the lunar surface on 14 December.

Original article, published 26 November 2013

It’s been a while since the moon has had house guests. China is due to send a lander and a rover as early as next week to the lunar surface – the first attempt to land there in 37 years. But researchers say the mission could be a mixed blessing for spacecraft already in orbit.


China aims to use robots to return lunar material to Earth for study around 2017. To prepare for this, two previous Chinese probes took images of the moon from orbit. The latest mission, Chang’e-3, will be China’s first lunar touchdown. It includes a six-wheeled rover that has been named Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, after the mythological pet of lunar goddess Chang’e.

“This is going to be quite a feat – something that’s not been done for a number of years and something that China has never done,” says Clive Neal of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Details about the mission are thin on the ground, possibly because China does not want to release too much information about it in case it fails, suggests Neal. But according to Chinese media reports, the mission is due to blast off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China in early December.

Moon dust-up

The craft will aim to land on a flat plain inside a 235-kilometre-wide crater known as the Bay of Rainbows. The solar-powered rover may be able to travel at least 3 kilometres from the landing site. It will carry a ground-penetrating radar system that will probe the structure of the lunar crust down to perhaps 200 metres or so, along with a scoop for collecting soil samples that will help China test technology needed for its future sample-return mission. The rover will also carry a number of cameras, including two on a raised mast that may provide 3D images.

But China’s historic moon mission is due to arrive while a NASA probe called LADEE is also trying to take data on the moon’s almost non-existent atmosphere. Last week LADEE entered into the relatively low orbit needed for it to make its main observations and create a baseline for the composition of the lunar atmosphere.

If LADEE does not have its core data before the Chinese mission arrives in mid-to-late December, any gases that Chang’e-3 emits as it descends to the surface and any dust it kicks up on landing might be hard to disentangle from the normal conditions on the moon, says Neal. But if LADEE is able to complete its task first, it could have an unexpected opportunity to study how long any gas and dust added to the atmosphere stays aloft. “This can be a nice controlled experiment for the LADEE mission,” says Neal.

Project scientist Rick Elphic at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, is hopeful that Chang’e-3 will be more help than harm. He notes that the LADEE mission began some science observations on 21 October at a higher altitude and has already taken data under a range of different conditions, such as when the moon was bathed in particles streaming from the sun.

“It’s very early days yet,” he says. “But these observations, and others over coming weeks, will provide us with a good baseline.”