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Space Topics

Chang'e 1


After a successful mapping mission lasting about sixteen months (four months longer than originally planned), Chang'e 1 was deliberately crashed into the Moon on March 1, 2009.

The next decade ushers in a new era of lunar exploration with a remarkable number of missions to the Moon in development. The European SMART-1 mission recently concluded a successful mission, Japan's Kaguya and India's Chandrayaan-1 are in lunar orbit, and the United States is about to launch two lunar missions.

China has a fast-growing space program. A successful Moon mission would be the third major event in the history of China's space program, after the launch of their first orbiting satellite in November 1999 and first manned mission, when Yang Liwei orbited Earth fourteen times on the Shenzhou V on October 15, 2003.

The Chang'e program, named after an angel in a Chinese fairy tale who takes a magic potion and flies to the Moon, will be a three-part series of missions that will finish in about 2020. In addition to the orbiter Chang'e 1, the Chinese space agency is planning a mission to land a rover on the Moon, hoping to collect material that will be returned to Earth. Eventually, these missions may lead to manned expeditions to the Moon -- or to the possible development of a permanent, manned Moon base.

The entire mission series should last about thirteen years, for a total cost of about 14 billion Chinese Renminbi (equal to 1.73 billion U.S. dollars). In addition, China may cooperate with Russia in its Moon exploration program and is tentatively planning on signing a ten-year cooperation agreement in 2007.

Mission Facts
Launch: October 24, 2007 at 10:05 UTC
Lunar arrival: November 5, 2007 at 03:37 UTC
Lunar impact: March 1, 2008 at 08:13 UTC, at 1.5°S, 52.36°E