The blast likely deposited the boulder at its resting place next to the rover. The rover team suspects that it may have been ejected from a deep layer of basaltic bedrock by an ancient asteroid impact. Darker than the rest of the lunar surface (see the image of “Dragon Rock” in the gallery above), the boulder was “unusual in its appearance,” Zhang said. The rover came to a stop beside the crater’s edge, near a 13 foot-wide (4 meters) boulder. But instead the team found higher-than-expected iron concentrations in Mare Imbrium, alongside more expected values for magnesium, aluminum and other minerals. The rover team had expected to see lunar surface chemistry similar to the Apollo landing sites, Zhang told the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences meeting last month. Chinese scientists were surprised by measurements made at four stops on the rover’s route before it quit roaming, said planetary scientist Hao Zhang of the Chinese University of Geoscience in Hubei. Yutu fell into hibernation in January and hasn’t yet woken up.īut before its long sleep, Yutu explored a crater in Mare Imbrium, traveling just over 328 feet (100 meters) before it stalled. Unfortunately, tragedy soon struck the little rover, in the form of a failed solar panel - and then again when when its driving computer short-circuited, preventing its power-saving shutdown for the lunar night.
The spacecraft quickly deployed its little rover, Yutu (“Jade Rabbit”), which went to work rolling around the rocky terrain and using a spectroscope to analyze the chemistry of the lunar surface. After a six-day journey, it slipped into lunar orbit and nine days later touched down in a vast volcanic basin called Mare Imbrium. The Little Rover That CouldĬhang’e 3 launched in December 2013.
The images, some of which are in the gallery above, evoke a sense of adventure, of exploring a dusty, desolate alien landscape set amid the black curtain of space.Ĭhang’e 3 and Yutu have also returned a bunch of data to Earth, and mission scientists presented some of these results at two recent scientific conferences. Now, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has posted a new gallery of images shot by China’s lunar-landing Chang’e 3 spacecraft and its little rover, Yutu (hat tip to Emily Lakdawalla at the The Planetary Society!). More than 40 years ago, the Soviet Luna probes took the last surface panoramas from the moon, and just about that much time has passed since the last robot actually went to work on the moon, rather than collecting data from orbit. Not since 1976, when the Luna 24 spacecraft scooped moon rocks from Mare Crisium and returned them to Earth, has any spacecraft collected data from a perch on the moon itself. The moon is Earth’s nearest celestial companion, but we don’t often see fresh views of the lunar surface. If I could post it with a shared byline, I would! National Geographic’s Dan Vergano contributed reporting to this story, as well as writing and editing.
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