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commercial spaceflight companies. Within the next few decades, humans, their robots, and their needed
infrastructure will begin to have a steady presence on the lunar surface.
China’s Chang’e 3 mission arrived on the moon on December 14, 2013. Chang’e 3 is the landing stage of
China’s multi-stage moon mission, and includes an instrumented lander and rover. Both the lander and
rover have tested and used some of the equipment, and then hibernated for their first two-week long lunar
night. Once the sun returned they got back to work, and according to the Chinese press things seemed
to be working fine. On January 24, 2014 the lander powered down to hibernate for the second lunar
night phase, but before the rover could do the same, something went wrong in communication with the
Chinese scientists, and so its instruments and solar panels couldn’t be protected before the night came
with its -180 C temperature. It had been hoped that the Yutu rover would provide ground-truth for data
collected by the orbiters of China and other countries, but if Yutu doesn’t survive the night, this will need
to wait for Yutu’s backup rover in the Chang’e 4 mission, which will be launched in 2015.
The Yutu rover has these mineral and rock analyzing instruments: Ground Penetrating Radar, Panoramic
Camera, Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, and Visible/near-Infrared Imager. These are some of the same
kind of instruments aboard the Curiosity rover, which is studying the geology in its own area on Mars.
Hopefully the Chang’e 4 rover will get to use these instruments much more than Yutu did!
Yutu rover. Photo credit: CNSA/CCTV
ICY SCIENCE | QTR 1 2014