China's Space Program Thread II

[Temstar]

Successful launch of Chang'e 6, Long March 5 Y8 launched straight through pouring rain as it was designed to be capable of.
Rocket completed TLI and the spacecraft is on its way to the moon. Solar panes on both the orbiter stage and landing stage already successfully deployed too.

 

[2=GT]

Chang'e 6

 

[Cybertron42]

Chang'e 6
View attachment 129052

 

[Deino]

Launch was a success ...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1786335313889280225

 

[tacoburger]

Landing on the Moon will be towards the end of May, and touchdown back on earth with the samples will be on the end of June

 

[2=GT]

Yes, looks like a previously undisclosed mini rover.

 

[Xiongmao]

Landing on the Moon will be towards the end of May, and touchdown back on earth with the samples will be on the end of June

Why it take so long to land? It took only a week for Chang'e 5 lander to land on the lunar surface.

 

[anzha]

A bunch of links, western press and papers. I'm going to restrict it to moon related news in this post. There are a lot of papers as I've not posted in a while. I'll wait a day or so before posting the other papers as to not spam the forum.


I'll have Chang'e 6 first:

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separating this one as a bit of eye roller:

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and a paper associated:

Geologic context of Chang'e-6 candidate landing regions and potential non-mare materials in the returned samples

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Round out other moon related things from China:

China's Geological Atlas of the Lunar Globe gets discussed:

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Mapping the spatial distributions of oxide abundances and Mg# on the lunar surface using multi-source data and a new ensemble learning algorithm

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Crewed moon landing by 2030?

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[by78]

High-resolution images from the Chang'e-6 launch.

 

[tacoburger]

Why it take so long to land? It took only a week for Chang'e 5 lander to land on the lunar surface.

I don't think there's an official reason right now. But if I had to guess, since this is the Lunar far side and all data has to be passed though a relay satellite, they might be using the extra time to 100% make sure that the relay satellite has no issues. And maybe testing a few extra things as well. We have all seen how the recent Japanese and America lunar landings have failed for really stupid reasons.