It would be no exaggeration to say that we live in an innovation space exploration. In particular, the moon has become the focal point of attention. In addition to President Trump's recent directive to NASA to return to the moon, many other space agencies and private aerospace companies are planning their own missions to the moon surface.
A good example is the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP), otherwise known as the Change Program. Named in honor of the ancient Chinese lunar goddess, this program has already sent two orbiters and one lander to the moon already And later this year, the Change 4 mission will begin, for example, on the path of the moon, where it will study the local geology and test.
The mission will comprise a relay orbiter being launched on a long March 5 rocket in June of 2018. This relay will assume an orbit around the Earth-moon L2 Lagrange Point, followed by the launch of the lander and rovers about six months later. In addition to an advanced suite of instruments for studying the moon's surface, the lender will also be carrying an aluminum alloy container filled with seeds and insects.
As Zhang Yuanxun - chief designer of the container - told the Chongqing Morning Post (according to China Daily):
"The container will send potatoes, Arabidopsis seeds, and silkworm eggs to the surface of the moon.The eggs will hatch in silkworms, which can produce carbon dioxide, while the potatoes and seeds emit oxygen through photosynthesis. Together, they can be a simple ecosystem on the moon. "
The mission will also be the first time that a mission is sent to an unexplored region. This region is none other than the South Pole-Aitken Basin, a vast impact area in the southern hemisphere. Measuring roughly 2,500 km (1,600 mi) in diameter and 13 kilometers (8.1 mi) deep, it is the single-largest impact basin on the moon and one of the largest in the solar system.
This basin is also the source of great interest to scientists, and not just because of its size. In recent years, it has been discovered that the area also contains vast amounts of water ice. These are the consequences of impacts by meteors and asteroids, which left water ice that survived the region. Without direct sunlight, water ice in these craters has not been subject to sublimation and chemical dissociation.
Since the 1960s, many missions have been explored this region from the orbit, including the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions, The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter. This last mission (which was mounted in 2008) also involved the Moon Impact Probe to the surface to trigger the release of material, which was then analyzed by the orbiter.
The mission was confirmed as the water ice in the Aitken Crater, a discovery which was confirmed about a year later by NASA's LRO. Thanks to this discovery, there have been many in the exploration community who have said that the South Pole-Aitken Basin would be the ideal location for a lunar base. In this respect, the Chang's 4 mission is investigating the very possibility of living and working on the moon.
Aside from Telling more about the local terrain, it will also assess whether or not terrestrial organisms can grow and thrive in the moon gravity - which is about 16% that of Earths (or 0.1654 g). Previous studies conducted aboard the ISS has shown that long-term exposure to microgravity can have considerable health effects, but little is known about the effects of lower gravity.
The European Space Agency has also been vocal about the possibility of building an International Lunar Village in the Southern Polar region by the 2030s. Intrinsic to this is the proposed Lunar Polar Sample Return Mission, a joint effort between the ESA and Roscosmos that will include sending a robotic probe to the moon's South Pole-Aitken Basin by 2020 to retrieve samples of ice.
In the past, NASA has also discussed ideas for building a lunar base in the southern polar region. Back in 2014, NASA scientists met with Harvard geneticist George Church, Peter Diamandis (creator of the X Prize Foundation) and other parties to discuss low-cost options. According to the papers that resulted from the meeting, this base existed at one of the poles and would be modeled on the U.S. Antarctic Station at the South Pole.
If all goes well for the Change 4 mission, China intends to follow it up with more robotic missions, and an attempted crewed mission in about 15 years. There is also a radio telescope as part of the mission. This RF instrument will be deployed to the far side of the moon where it will be undistributed by radio signals coming from Earth (which is a common headache when it comes to radio astronomy).
And the mission can tellWe are the South Pole-Aitken Basin (i.e. whether the water ice is plentiful and the radiation tolerable), it is possible that the space agencies will be coming in the coming years in more missions. Some of them may also be robots and building materials!
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