China to launch a Moon mission that is unlike anything NASA has done

Lunar exploration has come a long way since the Soviet Union’s Luna-1 probe reached the Moon’s vicinity in January 1959. The Apollo missions and their successors showed the challenge is no longer simply to reach the Moon. It is to explore places human and conventional rovers cannot easily go, and ultimately determine whether the Moon itself can provide some of the resources that future explorers will need. China has spent two decades building an increasingly ambitious lunar exploration programme, named after Chang'e, the ancient Chinese goddess of the Moon. The Chang'e-7 mission is expected to set course for our celestial neighbour later this month, although a recent failure involving a different Chinese rocket has introduced some uncertainty over the launch date. Here’s what makes this latest mission so interesting.

Source: independent.co.uk