The first of three photographs sent by Chang’e-4 appeared a little over an hour after the spacecraft touched down as planned at 10:26 a.m., Beijing time, in the middle of a crater not far from the moon’s south pole. It showed a barren, undulating vista pocked by a smaller crater, as did another picture sent 12 hours later as the rover began its journey.

Contrary to the enduring but mistaken notion that the moon has a “dark side” — you can blame Pink Floyd for that, at least in part — the photographs showed the landscape bathed in an orange hue, casting the sharp shadows from the lander and the rover. The other two, in black and white, showed the lander descending.

The spacecraft was the first to land intact on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth. A Soviet satellite took the first photographs of the far side in 1959, and the Apollo missions circled above it between 1968 and 1972, but the difficulty of communicating with earthbound scientists had always made the idea of landing there more complex, if not necessarily prohibitive.