Overview of the Latest Scientific Achievements of Chang’E-4 Mission of China’s Lunar Exploration Project
doi: 10.11728/cjss2022.04.yg30
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Abstract: On 3 January 2019, the Chang’E-4 probe successfully landed in the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon. On 4 January, the Yutu-2 rover was successfully separated from the lander and the scientific payloads were powered on to conduct scientific exploration. It was the first time that man-made probe achieved soft landing and roving on the far side of the Moon. Based on the data obtained by scientific payloads on the Chang’E-4, the research team obtained geological information such as landing area topography, structure and composition; demonstrated the existence of deep materials—mainly olivine and low-calcium pyroxene in the South Pole-Aitken Basin; achieved high-precision imaging of the layered structure of lunar subsurface in the roving area; discovered carbonaceous spheroidal meteorite residues and impact glass; preliminarily revealed the geological evolutionary history of the South Pole-Aitken Basin; for the first time, obtained information of the radiation dose of energetic particles at the lunar surface and the structure of the lunar neutral atomic energy spectrum; discovered the lunar mini-magnetosphere and contributed new knowledge of the radiation hazards at the lunar surface. This article summarizes the latest scientific achievement from the Chang’E-4 mission over the past three years.
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Key words:
- Chang’E-4 /
- Scientific objectives /
- Scientific payloads /
- Scientific achievement
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Figure 8. Centimeter-sized glass globules collected by the Apollo 16 missions (a) (b) and those observed by the Chang’E-4 mission (c) (d). Note that the Apollo 16 mission was landed in the lunar highland, but the landing region was dominated by distal ejecta from the nearside. (e) (f) The two globules are accompanied by similar-sized fragments excavated by fresh impact craters nearby
Figure 9. LPR data at 500 MHz. (a) LPR 500-MHz radargram represented in standard seismic colors after applying Dewow, background subtraction, and Spherical and Exponential Compensation (SEC) gain and migration. (b) Tomographic reconstruction of the radar data, where red represents high reflectivity and blue is low reflectivity. (c) Schematic of the stratigraphic sequence highlighting the contacts between units and the relevant thicknesses based on the radargram and the tomographic reconstruction
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