Beijing: After China’s Chang’e-6 touched down on the far side of the moon on Sunday morning to collect samples, foreign scientists participating in the mission expressed their excitement and thanks for taking their scientific instruments to the moon.
The Chang’e-6 mission carried four payloads developed through international cooperation, providing more opportunities for global scientists and merging human expertise in space exploration. Scientific instruments from France, Italy and the European Space Agency (ESA)/Sweden are aboard the Chang’e-6 lander, Xinhua news agency reported.
“Thank China so much for taking us to the moon,” Sylvestre Maurice, a French astronomer from the University of Toulouse, said after he watched the landing process in a control room at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Sunday.
“Today’s landing is absolutely amazing. It’s hard to land on a planet, and it’s very hard, especially on the moon. Don’t think it’s easy. Remember it’s on the far side of the moon where we cannot see. And China had even to put in another relay satellite to watch the landing. They landed right where they wanted to. So it’s quite an achievement, something we’ve been looking for so many years,” he said.
Supported by the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, the lander-ascender combination of the Chang’e-6 probe successfully landed at the designated landing area at 6:23 a.m. (Beijing Time) in the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin, according to the China National Space Administration.
“The far side of the moon is very unique. The South Pole-Aitken Basin is a huge basin. There was an impact a long time ago to remove most of the crust, so we might have landed as close as possible to the mantle of the moon,” Maurice said.
“As planetary scientists, the best thing we can dream of is to have samples in our lab. Nothing is better than having samples here, where we can study them and really go into the details of the story of the moon,” he added.
He mentioned that French scientists have got the lunar sample returned by the Chang’e-5 mission and would carry out research on it.
“We were very lucky to collaborate with China on different projects including the Chang’e lunar programme and the Tianwen-1 Mars mission,” Maurice said.
Mathieu Grialou, a representative from the French space agency CNES, said Chang’e-6 will be the first mission to bring back samples from the far side of the moon. “We are very thrilled to be a small part of this very big mission.”
“We are very happy to cooperate with China on this mission as China is now a big player in space,” Grialou said. “It’s great that we can contribute together to a better knowledge of the moon and our solar system.” A scientific instrument named Detection of Outgassing RadoN (DORN), developed by French scientists and onboard the lander of Chang’e-6, will detect radon isotopes and study the transmission and diffusion mechanisms of volatile compounds in the lunar environment. Witnessing the landing of Chang’e-6, Pierre-Yves Meslin, principal investigator of DORN from France, said, “We have been thinking about this moment for years and even more intensely for the last few months and weeks and days. We were almost watching the moon every night here in Beijing.” “We are very glad to be on the surface of the moon. Our instrument will start working. Now the pressure will be on us to succeed in our measurements,” Meslin said. (IANS)
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