In an announcement last month, NASA officials announced major changes to its Moon program, pushing the first lunar landing attempt from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4 — and deferring the plan to land astronauts on the Earth’s natural satellite from 2027 to some time in 2028.
The reshuffling once again stoked fears that China could beat the United States to the Moon, a subject of heated debate among lawmakers.
China’s first crewed lunar mission continues to come into focus. The country’s space program has already been simulating lunar landings and launches and performing spacecraft abort and rocket tests, as Space.com reports.
Now, in a new study by an international team of researchers published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, researchers identified a suitable landing area for the mission: a volcanic region on the Moon’s near side.
More specifically, they outlined “four prospective landing sites” in the “traversable areas” of the Sinus Aestuum basin — an ancient and relatively flat impact crater that’s bordered by far more irregular highlands and features “rilles,” or volcanic trenches — and the neighboring Rimae Bode, a bowl-shaped crater with similar features.
These sites, which are hundreds of miles north of the Moon’s south pole, a region NASA is eyeing for its landing, are particularly intriguing and scientifically valuable as they “provide a range of diverse geological samples, including volcanic debris, mare basalts, Copernicus crater ejecta and high-[thorium] materials,” according to the paper. “Such a collection may provide insights into the geological evolution of the region and enhance our understanding of the lunar mantle composition and volcanic processes.”
The region has long been lauded as an excellent place to land astronauts for over half a century.
“Rimae Bode would be on my ‘lunar human exploration landing site short list,’” Brown University professor Jim Head, who helped NASA select landing sites for its Apollo missions and collaborated with Chinese scientists, but was not part of the study, told Scientific American. “More than 50 years after Apollo, the importance of the multiple compelling scientific objectives at Rimae Bode remain!”
Coauthor and China University of Geosciences planetary geologist Jun Huang likened the Rimae Bode to a “geological ‘all-you-can-eat buffet’ that the south pole can’t provide” in comments to SciAm.
By studying intriguing glass beads found in the ash of Rimae Bode, we could “finally understand what the Moon is actually made of, deep inside, and piece together the complete story of how its volcanic activity evolved over time, transforming the moon from a fiery, active world into the quiet neighbor we see today,” he added.
But safely landing a human crew in the area remains as perilous as ever. China is hoping to launch an uncrewed lander at the Moon’s south pole later this year. A follow-up mission, scheduled for 2029, will explore the area in preparation for China’s International Lunar Research Station, a partnership with Russia, among several other countries, but not the US.
China’s first crewed landing attempt is still slated for before the end of the decade, though its Moon program will face an extraordinary challenge to meet that deadline.
Given NASA’s latest announcement, both countries appear to be taking a sequential approach resembling the Apollo program, as Head told SciAm — small steps that could culminate in boots on the lunar ground for the first time in over 50 years.
More on Moon landings: After Nixing Its Artemis 3 Moon Landing, NASA Is Starting to Seriously Lose the Moon Race to China
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