Say cheese: US space agency Nasa zooms in on China’s Chang’e 4 lander on far side of the moon
- US orbiter sends photo of Chinese lander in Von Kármán crater
- Cooperation and lessons from Chang’e 4 will help Nasa with next moon missions
American space agency Nasa has released a photo pinpointing the location of the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e 4 on the far side of the moon.
The black-and-white image released on Wednesday showed a white dot on the moon’s surface captured by Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed over the South Pole-Aitken basin on January 30, nearly a month after the Chinese spacecraft landed there.
Chang’e 4 is about the size of a car and was about two pixels across, while its rover, the Yutu 2, was not visible in the photo taken from 330km (205 miles) above the lunar surface.
The spacecraft landed inside the 186km-wide Von Kármán crater. The crater’s west wall is more than 3km high and was formed by an impact about 3.9 billion years ago.
The crater is named after Theodore von Karman, lead scientist of the early US space programme who was also the mentor of Hsue-shen Tsien, the founding father of China’s space programme, state media said.
Close-up images of the lander were revealed by China after Chang’e 4 and Yutu 2 took a picture of each other and sent them back to Earth through the Queqiao relay satellite a week after the landing.