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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted new images of the Chinese Chang'e 4 lander and rover, while Chinese robots are exploring the soil of the Von Kármán crater.
LRO took a series of pictures of Chang & # 4; from different angles of view. The most detailed view was captured on February 1 as the orbiter flew over at an altitude of about 82 km, according to an update written by Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, at Arizona State University.
Chang'e 4 landed on the moon on January 3rd, curbing a touchdown on the floor of the crater Von Kármán, a crater 110 km wide (180 km) in the southern hemisphere, on the other side of the moon. The Chinese lander has become the first spacecraft to achieve a controlled landing on the lunar side, which never faces the Earth.
Last year, a dedicated communications satellite launched by China relayed signals between Earth and Chang'e 4.
The Chang'e 4 mission includes a fixed lander and a mobile, each equipped with a camera and scientific instruments. The two vehicles were built as spare parts for the Chinese mission Chang'e 3, which was the first Chinese lunar lander, to land on the moon side in December 2013.
The Chinese authorities reassigned Chang'e 4 with new scientific instruments and sent it away from the moon.
In LRO's February 1 image, the Yutu 2 rover is visible about 29 meters from the Chang'e 4 Lander.
A previous LRO image captured on January 30th showed the Chang'e 4 under a more oblique view, providing a spectacular backdrop to the position of the craft in the Von Kármán crater, itself marked by many smaller craters created by asteroid impacts.
The hidden face of the moon looks very different from the one facing the Earth. The other side has more craters and is more rugged, and Chang'e 4 explores a site in the Von Kármán crater that was filled with basaltic lava extracted from a nearby crater.
"Chang'e 4 will collect measurements of the composition of these basaltic rocks located outside, and lunar scientists eagerly await these results. Are the volcanic rocks on the opposite side different from the basalt collected on the near side? We will have to wait and see! Robinson wrote in a February 8 blog.
"According to the CNSA (China National Space Administration), the Chang'e instrumentation 4 includes the Visible Near Infrared Spectrometer (VNIS), which takes action that can be used to answer this question," Robinson wrote. "This new information from the surface will provide important ground truth, while the combination of surface and orbital measurements provides a synergy that will advance knowledge of the far side."
Approaching its 10th anniversary in lunar orbit, LRO examined the Moon's landscapes and searched for ice in the water, spotting cold pockets where frost might be present near the lunar south pole. Throughout its mission, LRO's high resolution mapping camera captured images of Apollo's lunar landing sites and spotted the Chinese robotic probes Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 on the surface after their landing.
The Chang'e 4 Yutu Rover has accumulated nearly 120 meters of driving, eclipsing the movement made by the Chang'e 3 rover at the end of 2013 and early 2014 before losing its mobility. The Chinese authorities have announced that the rover and the lander were hibernating on February 11 for the second lunar night of the mission since landing, with reopening on February 28 and March 1, respectively, to resume their scientific observations. .
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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