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China is about to make humankind's first visit to the farside of the moon

China is about to make space history. In December, the country will launch the first spacecraft ever to land on the farside of the moon. Another craft, slated for takeoff in 2019, will be the first to bring lunar rocks back to Earth since 1976.

These two missions — the latest in China’s lunar exploration series named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e — are at the forefront of renewed interest in exploring our nearest celestial body. India’s space agency as well as private companies based in Israel and Germany are also hoping for robotic lunar missions in 2019. And the United States aims to have astronauts orbiting the moon starting in 2023 and to land astronauts on the lunar surface in the late 2020s.

The time is ripe for new lunar exploration. Despite decades of study, Earth’s only natural satellite still contains mysteries about its formation as well as clues to the history of the solar system (SN: 4/15/17, p. 18). “There are too many things we don’t know,” says planetary scientist Long Xiao of China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. He is a coauthor of two studies published in June and July in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets describing the landing sites of the new Chinese missions, Chang’e-4 and -5.

To figure out what secrets the moon may still be hiding, scientists are excited to get their hands on new rock samples. The Chang’e-5 sample return mission “no doubt will have additional rock types that we haven’t sampled yet,” says planetary scientist David Blewett of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. “If you came to the Earth and landed in Great Britain and made all your conclusions about the Earth from what you saw … you really wouldn’t have the whole picture.”

Because the moon always shows the same face to Earth, astronomers on the ground won’t be able to communicate directly with Chang’e-4. So in May, the Chinese space agency launched a transmission relay satellite to a point beyond the moon to bounce data and communication signals back and forth between the lunar surface and Earth (SN Online: 5/20/18). That satellite, called Queqiao, is named after the mythical bridge of magpies that spans the Milky Way once a year to enable a tryst between two lovers.

Sometime in 2019, the Chang’e-5 craft will visit a region on the near side of the moon that no spacecraft or astronaut has been to before. And that mission will give scientists something they haven’t had in more than four decades — new lunar rock samples.

[...] Chang’e-5’s lander will scoop surface rocks and dig two meters deep in a 58,000-square-kilometer area called the Rümker region that’s strewn with minerals dating to a variety of periods of volcanic activity. The craft will then bundle up to two kilograms of material into a rocket, which will launch to meet Chang’e-5’s orbiter and return to Earth.

[...] Understanding the moon’s volcanic history could shed light on competing ideas about how the moon came to be. For instance, scientists still don’t agree on whether our neighbor formed from one giant impact with Earth in the early days of the solar system, around 4.5 billion years ago, or from about 20 small ones, or something else. Finding evidence for more recent geologic activity could be a ding for the single impact hypothesis.

What’s more, the returned samples would also be stored and preserved “so that future scientists who aren’t born yet can answer future questions we haven’t asked yet, with tools we haven’t invented yet,” says astrochemist Jamie Elsila of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She would know: Born nearly two years after the last Apollo mission, Elsila published a study in 2016 that used modern techniques to show that Apollo soil samples contain amino acids mostly derived from Earth.

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