BEIJING: China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.
The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the United States are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.
The Chang’e-6 craft, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, touched down in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon’s space-facing side at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (2223 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty,” the agency said in a statement on its website. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
The successful mission is China’s second on the far side of the moon, a region no other country has reached. The side of the moon perpetually facing away from the Earth is dotted with deep and dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations more challenging.
Given these challenges, lunar and space experts involved in the Chang’e-6 mission described the landing phase as a moment where the chance of failure is the highest.
“Landing on the far side of the moon is very difficult because you don’t have line-of-sight communications, you’re relying on a lot of links in the chain to control what is going on, or you have to automate what is going on,” said Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at the European Space Agency working with China on one of the Chang’e-6 payloads.
“Automation is very difficult especially at high latitudes because you have long shadows which can be very confusing for landers,” Melville added.
The Chang’e-6 probe launched on May 3 on China’s Long March 5 rocket from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan, reaching the lunar vicinity roughly a week later before tightening its orbit in preparation for a landing.
Chang’e-6 marks the world’s third lunar landing this year: Japan’s SLIM lander touched down in January, followed the next month by a lander from US startup Intuitive Machines.
The other countries that have sent spacecraft to Earth’s nearest neighbor are the then-Soviet Union and India. The United States is the only country to have landed humans on the moon, starting in 1969.
SAMPLING THE MOON
Using a scoop and drill, the Chang’e-6 lander will aim to collect 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of lunar material over two days and bring it back to Earth.
The samples will be transferred to a rocket booster atop the lander, which will launch back into space, tag up with another spacecraft in lunar orbit and return, with a landing in China’s Inner Mongolia region expected around June 25.
If all goes as planned, the mission will provide China with a pristine record of the moon’s 4.5 billion-year history and yield new clues on the solar system’s formation. It will also allow for an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region with the moon’s better understood Earth-facing side.
A simulation lab for the Chang’e-6 probe will develop and verify sampling strategies and equipment control procedures, China’s official Xinhua news agency said. It will use a full-scale replica of the sampling area based on exploration results on the environment, rock distribution and lunar soil conditions around the landing site.
China’s lunar strategy includes its first astronaut landing around 2030 in a program that counts Russia as a partner. In 2020 China conducted its first lunar sample return mission with Chang’e-5, retrieving samples from the moon’s nearer side.
The US Artemis program envisions a crewed moon landing by late 2026 or later. NASA has partnered with space agencies including those of Canada, Europe and Japan, whose astronauts will join US crews on an Artemis mission.
Artemis relies heavily on private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, whose Starship rocket aims this decade to attempt the first astronaut landing since NASA’s final Apollo mission in 1972.
On Saturday Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa canceled a private mission around the moon he had paid for, which was to have used SpaceX’s Starship, citing schedule uncertainties in the rocket’s development.
Boeing and NASA postponed the company’s first crewed launch of Starliner, a long-delayed capsule meant to become the second US space taxi to low-Earth orbit.
China lands on moon’s far side in historic sample-retrieval mission
https://arab.news/b953n
China lands on moon’s far side in historic sample-retrieval mission
- Chang’e-6 craft touched down in gigantic crater on moon’s space-facing side
- The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon
Will Afghanistan’s pledge against cross-border attacks ease tensions with Pakistan?
- Afghan clerics’ decree banned use of Afghan soil for cross-border attacks on Wednesday
- Latest heavy firing between Afghanistan, Pakistan killed at least 5 people
KABUL: As tensions flare up again between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Afghan leadership has moved to reaffirm its commitment against cross-border militancy this week in what is seen as Kabul’s attempt to move the needle on peace negotiations, after multiple rounds of talks failed to produce a lasting truce.
The neighboring countries have struggled to maintain a fragile ceasefire after border clashes killed dozens in October, the worst fighting since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021.
While subsequent talks toward a permanent ceasefire yielded little progress, the temporary truce brokered by Qatar and Turkiye collapsed last Friday, with heavy firing along the Spin Boldak-Chaman border that killed at least five people.
Over the years Pakistan has put much of the blame for the border clashes on the government in Kabul allowing Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan — an outlawed armed group, which is separate from the Afghan Taliban — to use Afghan territory for cross-border attacks — a claim that Afghanistan has repeatedly denied.
Afghanistan again pledged to prevent its territory from being used to harm other countries on Thursday, with Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi highlighting it as a religious duty, as endorsed just a day earlier by around 1,000 Afghan clerics in a fatwa, or religious decree.
“The fatwa was more political than religious,” Kabul University lecturer Abdullah Awwab told Arab News on Friday.
“I think it was a smooth way out of the pressure put on them by Pakistan and mediators, who were asking for a fatwa against the TTP. The emirate couldn’t issue that, so instead they had scholars issue a fatwa for ordinary Afghans, banning them from jihad abroad.
“The fatwa shows Pakistan that the Taliban can use a fatwa to stop Afghans from joining the war. It demonstrates Kabul’s power and control over its own soil and people — and, at the same time, it shows Pakistan’s weakness in needing to ask Kabul for a religious fatwa.”
Addressing new graduates at a ceremony in Kabul, Muttaqi said the Taliban had not “permitted anyone to carry out military activities in other countries” and that the government had the right to take action against anyone who violated the directive.
“The leaders and elders of this Islamic emirate have pledged that Afghan soil will not be used to harm anyone. All the scholars and religious leaders affirmed that obeying this commitment is necessary for all Muslims,” he said.
“Just as this nation has historically acted upon the fatwas and advice of its scholars, so too will (it) act upon them now. This is our shared duty.”
Asif Durrani, Pakistan’s former special envoy to Afghanistan, said the decree was a “very significant” development.
“Hopefully, the TTP, which owes allegiance to the Taliban’s Supreme Leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, will now submit to the collective wisdom of the Afghan Taliban ulema and surrender arms,” he wrote on X.
Though the decree answers one of Pakistan’s demands, Afghan political analyst Wasi Baheer said it had “no direct impact” in the conflict.
“Pakistan’s harsh words and threats to Kabul don’t mean much, because the real issue is inside Pakistan,” he told Arab News.
“They cannot simply force changes in Kabul. The main reason talks collapsed in Qatar, Istanbul, and Saudi Arabia is that Pakistan demanded the Taliban act harshly against the TTP — which makes no sense, because it is an internal Pakistani problem. Using force here in Afghanistan will not bring any relief to Pakistan’s security.”
