China Pulled Off the First Soft Moon Landing in Almost 40 Years

The Chang'e-3 and Yutu rover. Photo via the Beijing institute of Spacecraft System Engineering.

The Chang'e-3 spacecraft landed safely in the Bay of Rainbows early this morning, further cementing China as one the most ambitious players in modern spaceflight. It's now the third nation to successfully soft-land a probe on the moon, a feat that has not been performed since the Soviet probe Luna 24 touched down in the Sea of Crisis in 1976.

Hard landings of lunar vehicles have been common since the Space Race (check out our history of kamikaze lunar missions for more on that). Soft landings, however, have been held in arrested development for decades due to the monumental planning and expense involved in blasting a hunk of metal at the moon and expecting it to incur zero damage when it gets there.

But the Chinese has made no secret of its ambition to achieve leadership in outer space, and Chang'e-3 is a compelling piece of evidence that the country is not messing around. China expects to launch a permanent space station in roughly seven years, followed by a manned moon landing during the 2020s.

Space exploration advocates, damaged as we are by decades of watching lofty goals fail to pan out, are right to be skeptical of such claims. Even so, the sophistication of the Chang'e-3 genuinely speaks to the nation's dedication to more aggressive space exploration.

For example, in addition to being China's first soft-lander, the Chang'e-3's is equipped with a Lunar-based Ultraviolet Telescope (LUT) and an Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUV). These instruments make it the world's first moon-based observatory.

As if that wasn't novelty enough, a rover also hitched a ride on the ship—the first mobile unit to grace the lunar surface since Soviet Lunokhod 2 ceased operations in May 1973. The Yutu or “Jade Rabbit,” is expected to be deployed later this weekend, and will spend three months roving around the Bay of Rainbows.

The Sinus Iridum, aka Bay of Rainbows. Photo via NASA.

The rover will explore the topography of around three square kilometers with its specialized ground penetration radar system. Yutu is essentially hooked up to Skype too, given that it can transmit real-time video for its engineers on Earth. Indeed, visuals are a huge part of the mission's appeal. Chang'e-3 has already taken dozens of photos of its surroundings, and we can expect even more once Yutu separates and begins its romp around the area.

The China National Space Administration is unlikely to rest on its lunar laurels for long, especially if it's hoping to place a human on the moon and a permanent space station in orbit within the next 15 years. So while the Space Age was definitively owned by astronauts and cosmonauts, the 21st Century may well be the age of the taikonauts.