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6 | NewScientist | 21/28 December 2013 LET the moon rush begin. Last week China placed a lander and rover on the lunar surface, 37 years after the last nation touched down. China’s first moon landing, the Chang’e-3 mission, marks the rekindling of humanity’s love affair with our only natural satellite. About a dozen robotic landers and rovers are on the drawing board for launch between now and 2020, many from burgeoning space powers or private ventures that have never yet attempted a landing on an extraterrestrial body. This flotilla of 21st-century moon explorers should arrive bristling with technologies that will help them map the moon’s uncharted regions and prospect for resources that could one day sustain lunar outposts and missions further afield (see “The international lunar line-up”, right). The crew of the final Apollo mission lifted off from the moon’s Sea of Serenity on 14 December 1972, and the last robotic Soviet spacecraft to make it to the surface was in 1976. After that, the moon’s only visitors have been a dozen or so orbiters and deliberate crashes such as NASA’s LCROSS mission in 2009, which created plumes of dust for analysis by orbiters. Launched on 2 December, Chang’e-3 touched down in a 1160-kilometre-wide basin known as the Sea of Rains. The lander then released a six-wheeled rover named Yutu – which translates as “Jade Rabbit” – after the mythological pet of lunar goddess Chang’e. India and South Korea are also in the running to send missions to the moon involving landers and rovers. Both could launch by 2020. The superpower’s first lander kicks off a modern race to explore and mine the moon. Maggie McKee reports CHINA LEADS RUSH TO MOON “The moon is the nearest island in space out from the Earth,” says Igor Mitrofanov at Russia’s Institute for Space Research in Moscow, the project scientist for two planned Russian-led rover missions. As countries develop their space programmes, a lunar trek is a natural first foray. But the moon is more than a test bed. China’s Yutu rover will venture a few kilometres from its landing site to snap images, take stock of minerals with on- board spectrometers and use radar to probe below the surface. It could reveal volcanic episodes at the site, which is covered by lava deposits. “To know the origin and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth,” says Tatsuaki Hashimoto of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the lead scientist for a proposed lunar rover called SELENE-2. The moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of an impact between a Mars-sized world and Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. “It’s a part of the Earth,” says Bernard Foing, director of the International Lunar Exploration Working Group, a forum sponsored by multiple space agencies. “I call it the eighth continent.” Several of the proposed exploration missions are targeting the moon’s poles, which have never been visited by a lander. Measurements collected by orbiters support the idea that the rocks and craters at both poles harbour millions or even billions of tonnes of water. The moon’s moisture could be a good resource for advancing robotic and human exploration, says Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas. Astronauts could drink the water or use it as a radiation shield. Water could also be split into hydrogen and oxygen for use as rocket fuel. Much of the weight of today’s rockets comes from their propellant, so having a source of fuel already in space would pave the way for more ambitious crewed missions. “If we’re really interested in extending our reach to Mars and beyond, we don’t want to have to bring fuel with us,” says Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. He is the project scientist on a proposed robotic mission called Resource Prospector, which could launch in 2018 to try to extract water from lunar rocks. Private groups are hoping to get in on the action. The Google Lunar X Prize is offering $20 million to the first private team to land a spacecraft on the moon, make it travel 500 metres and send back video by the end of 2015. Some of the teams vying for the prize have their sights set on selling lunar-derived rocket fuel. And a US-based firm called Shackleton Energy Company says it wants to send robots and human miners to the moon around 2018 to supply water for fuel depots in space. Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington DC, is sceptical that a private company will be able to fund such a huge project. But he notes that most of the world’s space agencies, with the exception of the US, want to send astronauts to the moon. Once again China may be leading the renewed charge, with a possible crewed mission after 2025. “I personally believe that this is the beginning of the epoch of the permanent stay of humans on the moon,” says Mitrofanov. n “To know the origin and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth” The Chang’e-3 lander in the Sea of Rains, as seen by the Yutu rover SPECIAL REPORT / Lunar Landing DING LIN/XINHUA/LANDOV/PA
