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SALT LAKE CITY — China successfully launched its Chang'e-6 lunar probe on Friday, beginning a mission that aims to land on the far side of the lunar surface and gather and return samples in what would be a first in global space exploration.
The 53-day mission is seen as a critical step in the country's ambitious plans for expanding its space program which also include the goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2030.
China became the first and only country thus far to successfully land a spacecraft on the side of the moon that is permanently facing away from Earth. China's first successful moon landing occurred in 2017 when its Chang'e-4 craft landed on the far side of the moon. It followed up with the 2020 Chang'e-5 mission, which put a lander down on the near side of the moon, retrieved samples and successfully returned them to Earth, the first lunar sample retrieve-and-return mission for decades.
"The Chang'e-6 aims to achieve breakthroughs in the design and control technology of the moon's retrograde orbit, intelligent sampling, takeoff and ascent technologies, and automatic sample-return on the far side of the moon," Ge Ping, deputy director of the China National Space Administration's Center of Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering, said last week from the launch site, per CNN.
Friday's launch was attended by scientists, diplomats and space agency officials from France, Italy, Pakistan and the European Space Agency, all of which have moon-studying payloads aboard Chang'e-6, per a report from Reuters. Experts have noted the speed with which China is advancing its space exploration program, which is now vying with NASA to take the lead on lunar exploration.
"It is a bit of a mystery to us how China has been able to develop such an ambitious and successful program in such a short time," Pierre-Yves Meslin, a French researcher working on one of the scientific objectives of the Chang'e-6 mission, told Reuters.
What's so interesting about the moon's south pole?
The Chang'e-6 is aiming for a landing near the moon's south pole, an area that's earning rising interest thanks to a critical element believed to be concentrated there.
Scientists are accumulating mounting evidence that water ice could exist on or near the moon's surface and believe one of the most likely areas to find it could be in permanently shaded locations near the satellite's south pole. Water access will be a necessary component in any plans for a long-term human presence on the moon as a life necessity, source of oxygen production, a potential material for shielding against constant radiation bombardment, and as a material that can be refined into its base components of oxygen and hydrogen to fuel potential rocket launches from the lunar surface.
Earlier this year, NASA announced it was pushing out next steps in its multiphase Artemis moonshot program with two crewed mission launch dates, one aiming to orbit the moon and the other hoping to put astronauts on the lunar surface, each bumped out by one year.
In January, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the Artemis II mission, slated to carry astronauts on a journey that would include orbiting the moon, is now scheduled for launch in September 2025. The Artemis III mission, which will return astronauts to the surface of the moon for the first time in over 50 years, now has a September 2026 target launch date.
Nelson noted the success of the Artemis I mission in late 2022 that included a new, massive Space Launch System rocket and a 25-day journey for the unmanned Orion crew capsule, which splashed down in the Pacific on Dec. 14 that year after traveling nearly 1.4 million miles.
Artemis I was the first step in a program aiming to not just put astronauts back on the moon but to establish a base station there and develop systems to use the Earth's sole satellite as a launch site for, ultimately, sending human explorers to Mars.
