First in history! China's spacecraft nears landing on the far side of moon China is only the third country - it followed the United States and Russia - to send its own astronauts into space aboard its own rockets.
First in history! China's spacecraft nears landing on the far side of moon on Business Standard. China is only the third country - it followed the United States and Russia - to send its own astronauts into space aboard its own rockets.
International News
» China is trying to reach a milestone in space
exploration: landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon for the first time in history. The mission is one in a series that underscore the country’s ambitions to join — and even lead — the space race. The spacecraft, whose landing could come on Thursday, is called Chang’e-4 after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology. China landed another rover on the moon in 2013, joining the United States and the Soviet Union as the only nations to have carried out a “soft landing” there, but the Chang’e-4 would be the first to touch down on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from the Earth. “This space mission shows that China has reached the advanced world-class level in deep space exploration,” said Zhu Menghua, a professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology who has worked closely with China’s space administration. “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.” Although a latecomer by decades to space exploration, China is quickly catching up, experts say, and could challenge the United States for supremacy in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other fields. China now plans to begin fully operating its third space station by 2022, to put astronauts in a lunar base by later in that decade, and to send probes to Mars, including ones that could return samples of the Martian surface back to Earth. Though the moon is hardly untrodden ground after decades of exploration, a new landing is far more than just propaganda coup, experts say.
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China Mission Moon News Source : BS & Business Standard