MCLC: China joins moon club

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: China joins moon club
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Source: NYT (12/14/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/world/asia/china-lands-probe-on-the-moon-
report-says.html

As Rover Lands, China Joins Moon Club
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — China on Saturday became the third country to steer a
spacecraft onto the moon after its unmanned Chang’e-3 probe settled onto
the Bay of Rainbows, state-run television reported.

The United States and the Soviet Union are the other countries to have
accomplished so-called soft landings on the moon — in which a craft can
work after landing — and 37 years have passed since the last such mission.

The successful arrival of the Chang’e-3 after a 13-day journey  from Earth
was reported on Chinese state television. Chinese news websites displayed
what they said was a photograph
<http://slide.news.sina.com.cn/c/slide_1_2841_38718.html#p=2> from the
craft of the moon’s surface. At the time of the last soft landing, by the
Soviet Union in 1976, Mao Zedong lay a month from death and China was in
the twilight of his chaotic Cultural Revolution. Now China, much richer
and stronger, aspires to become a globally respected power, and the
government sees a major presence in space as a key to acquiring
technological prowess, military strength and sheer status.

Chinese media celebrated the landing as a demonstration of the country’s
growing scientific stature. Television reports showed engineers at the
mission control center in Beijing crying, embracing and taking pictures of
one another on their cellphones.

“The dream of the Chinese people across thousands of years of landing on
the moon has finally been realized with Chang’e,” said the China News
Service, a state-run news agency. “By successfully joining the
international deep-space exploration club, we finally have the right to
share the resources on the moon with developed countries.”

The Chang’e-3 landing craft carried a solar-powered, robotic rover called
the Jade Rabbit, or Yutu in Mandarin Chinese, which was to emerge several
hours later to begin exploring Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, a
relatively smooth plain formed from solidified lava. According to a
Chinese legend, Chang’e is a moon goddess, accompanied by a Jade Rabbit
that can brew potions that offer immortality.

“It’s a very ambitious mission in the sense that it’s a rover with a fair
amount of instruments on it,” said Andrew Chaikin, a space historian and
an expert on lunar travel. The instruments include radar to gather
information about what lies as deep as 300 feet below the surface, Chinese
space scientists have said.

“There is the potential that some really interesting science could come
out of this,” Mr. Chaikin said.
But the mission also embodies China’s broader ambitions in space, other
experts said. The Chang’e-3 mission is honing technology for future
missions while also emphasizing exploration. The landing craft appears
capable of carrying a payload more than a dozen times the weight of the
309-pound rover, Paul D. Spudis, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary
Institute in Houston, said in an email.

“Although it will do some new science, its real value is to flight-qualify
a new and potentially powerful lunar surface payload delivery system,” Dr.
Spudis said.

A later Chang’e mission, sometime before 2020, is intended to bring back
rocks and other samples from the moon, and that will need a larger craft
capable of sending a vehicle back to Earth. That mission will also need a
more powerful launch rocket, which China is also developing.

Within a decade, China could also become the only country with an
operating space station. The International Space Station, which has been
open to astronauts from 15 countries, is due to be decommissioned by 2020,
and China’s own, much smaller station could be ready to go up about the
same time, if preparations go smoothly. China is not among the countries
allowed to use the international station.

Despite its benign name, China’s Jade Rabbit rover could kindle anxieties
among some American politicians and policy makers that the United States
risks losing its pre-eminence in space in coming decades. China’s opaque
space bureaucracy is overseen by the military, and that has magnified
wariness. Legislation passed by Congress in 2011 bars NASA from bilateral
contacts with China, although multilateral contacts are not proscribed.

In the past, some Chinese space engineers have also enthusiastically
endorsed eventually taking astronauts to the moon and back, which would
make China the second country, after the United States, to achieve that
feat. China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003.

A policy paper in 2011
<http://www.china.org.cn/government/whitepaper/node_7145648.htm> said
China would “conduct studies on the preliminary plan for a human lunar
landing,” but the government has not made any decision on a manned
mission, said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the United States Naval
War College in Rhode Island who researches China’s space activities.

“Certainly, they are putting all the building blocks in place so that if
they make that policy decision, they can move forward,” said Professor
Johnson-Freese. “But the Chinese are not risk-takers. They are not going
to approve that program until they are sure they are capable of all those
building blocks.”