China’s Chang’e 4, consisting of the lander and the Yutu 2 (Jade Rabbit 2) rover, have turned to sleep mode as the lunar night on the dark side of the Moon have arisen. The switch has been made on Tuesday morning, after Beijing time.
The scientific tools on the Chang’e 4 mission functioned greatly during the seventh lunar day immediately after the probe made the first recorded smooth landing. The landing site is the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon. Chang’e 4 disembarked on the lunar surface on January the 3rd, as the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration reported. A new set of 1.2 G scientific detection data collected by the vehicle was sent to the central research team for assay earlier this month.
A lunar day equals 14 days on Earth, as well as a lunar night. Chang’e 4 probe shifted to dormant mode during the lunar night because of the lack of solar power. As a consequence of the tidal locking effect, the Moon’s rotation orbit is the same as its revolution cycle, and thus the same side of it always faces the Earth.
China’s Chang’e 4 Entered Sleep Mode On The Dark Side Of The Moon For The Lunar Night
Chang’e 4 mission’s scientific tasks include low-frequency radio astronomical observation, exploring the terrain and the landforms, identifying the mineral composition and the shallow lunar structure, also measuring neutron radiation and neutral atoms.
The Yutu 2 rover has explored about 626 feet (191 meters) on the far side of the Moon until now, according to Xinhua. The mission is also gathering information about this mysterious area, via Chang’e 4’s Visible and Near-Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS), Panoramic Camera (PCam), and Lunar Penetrating Radar (LRP) instruments.
China’s robots will endure two weeks of the extreme lunar night before they restart and begin a new day of exploration. The Chang’e 4 mission materializes China’s aim to combine human knowledge in space exploration with four cargoes created by the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia.
