China targets scientific potential of moon’s south pole for lunar probe

China said it hopes to land its Chang'e-4 lunar probe on the south pole region of the moon in 2018 for its scientific research potential, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). Scientists plan to send a relay satellite for Chang'e-4 to the halo orbit of the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point L2 in late May or early June 2018, and then send the Chang'e-4 lunar lander and rover to the Aitken Basin of the south pole region about half a year later, said Liu Tongjie, deputy director of the CNSA's Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center. "We plan to land Chang'e-4 on the Aitken Basin because the region is believed to be a place with great scientific research potential," Liu told Xinhua in an exclusive interview. With its special environment and complex geological history, the far side of the moon is a hot spot for scientific and space exploration. However, landing and roving there requires a relay satellite to transmit signals. The transmission channel is limited, and the landscape is rugged, so the Chang'e-4 mission will be more complicated than Chang'e-3, China's first soft-landing mission on the moon, completed in 2013, Liu pointed out. Chang'e-4's lander will be equipped with descent and terrain cameras, and the rover with a panoramic camera, he said. Like China's first lunar rover Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, carried by Chang'e-3, the Chang'e-4 rover will carry subsurface penetrating radar to detect the near surface structure of the moon, and an infrared spectrometer to analyze the chemical composition of lunar samples. But unlike Chang'e-3, the new lander will be equipped with a low-frequency radio spectrometer specially designed for the far side of the moon.