52 // DISCOVERY | SCIENCE
A Walk on the Far Side AUTHOR // ANDY YIN You might think that we’ve exhausted the supply of ‘firsts’ to be reached on the moon. The Soviet Union took the prize for the first spacecraft on the moon with Luna 2 in 1959, while the United States was the first to put boots on lunar soil. Now, many decades after the final Apollo mission, it seems like interest in the moon has waned, in favour of more distant objectives like Mars or Saturn. But, amazingly, there is a first in spaceflight that hadn’t been
achieved until recently. On the third of January this year, the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e Four touched down on the far side of the moon. Previously, no soft landing on the far side had ever been achieved, although the Ranger 4 probe was crash-landed there in 1962. Landing a craft safely on the far side is, unsurprisingly, harder. The key difficulty, and the reason it hasn’t been done until
