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https://theconversation.com/china-is-launching-a-moon-mission-to-find-water-ice-its-unlike-anything-nasa-has-done-289710>
"How do you explore a place where the Sun never shines? China’s space programme
will soon embark on one of the most innovative lunar exploration missions in
recent years.
We’ve known for nearly two decades that some form of water exists on the Moon.
What we still don’t know is exactly how much accessible water ice lies inside
permanently shadowed craters, how deeply it is buried or what form it takes.
What we do know is that accessing that water ice will be a real challenge: it
is found at the bottom of deep, hard-to-traverse craters where the Sun never
shines, remaining untouched for billions of years at temperatures well below
–200°C. These are among the most valuable places on the Moon, but the hardest
to reach and explore.
Lunar exploration has come a long way since the Soviet Union’s
Luna-1 probe
reached the Moon’s vicinity in January 1959. The Apollo missions and their
successors showed the challenge is no longer simply to reach the Moon. It is to
explore places human and conventional rovers cannot easily go, and ultimately
determine whether the Moon itself can provide some of the resources that future
explorers will need.
China has spent two decades building an increasingly ambitious lunar
exploration programme, named after Chang'e, the ancient Chinese goddess of the
Moon. The
Chang'e-7 mission is expected to set course for our celestial
neighbour later this month, although a recent failure involving a different
Chinese rocket has introduced some uncertainty over the launch date. Here’s
what makes this latest mission so interesting."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
