China just landed on the far side of the south pole of the moon.
Instruments include several cameras, including one for awe-inspiring panoramas of the lunar surface. Chang’e-4 also comes equipped with radar that can penetrate the moon’s surface.
Chang’e-4 is carrying a “lunar biosphere” experiment containing plant seeds and silkworm eggs, as well as a low-frequency radio spectrometer that will let researchers study the sun’s high-energy atmosphere from afar. This instrument has an extra trick: By pairing it with an instrument on board Queqiao, Chinese researchers can use the two as a radio telescope. The moon’s far side is ideal for radio astronomy, since the moon blocks noise from Earth’s ionosphere and human radio transmissions. This will allow us for the first time to do radio observation at low frequencies that are not possible from Earth, from close to the moon and on the moon.
The mission’s scientists teamed up with German researchers to install a particle detector on the lander, and Swedish researchers put an ion detector on the rover. The radio-telescope instrument on Queqiao is a joint Dutch-Chinese effort.