BEIJING, March 1 (Xinhua) — Chang’e-1, China’s first lunar probe, impacted the moon at 4:13 p.m. Beijing Time (0813 GMT) Sunday, said sources with the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. <\/p>\n
The satellite ended its 16-month mission Sunday when it hit the lunar surface at 1.50 degrees south latitude and 52.36 degrees east longitude. <\/p>\n
Chang’e-1 began to reduce its speed at 3:36 p.m. Beijing Time (0736 GMT) under remote control by two observation and control stations in east China’s Qingdao and northwest China’s Kashi. <\/p>\n
This was the first phase of China’s three-stage moon mission, which will lead to a landing and launch of a rover vehicle around 2012. <\/p>\n
Chang’e-1 was launched into space on Oct. 24, 2007, and sent the first full map of the moon’s surface back to China one month later. <\/p>\n
A dozen performance tests were carried out while Chang’e-1 was in orbit to find out its orbit adjustment capability. <\/p>\n
The planned impact was designed to accumulate experience for landing of China’s second lunar probe. <\/p>\n
“The second phase of the space program aims at soft landing, and the preparation is currently in progress”, said Wu Weiren, chief designer of the country’s lunar probe program. <\/p>\n
In the third phase, another rover will land on the moon and bring back mineral samples for scientific research in 2017. <\/p>\n
“Chang’e” is named after a legendary Chinese moon goddess. <\/p>\n
Wu noted the success in the mission of Chang’e-1 had realized the dream of the whole nation and pushed forward the development of science and technology. It also proved China was capable of exploring the outer space, he added. <\/p>\n
China is the third nation, after the U.S. and Russia, to launch people into space after Yang Liwei was put into orbit aboard the spaceship Shenzhou-5 on October 15, 2003. Another three astronauts were sent into space in Shenzhou-7 and carried out the country’s first space walk in September of last year. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEIJING, March 1 (Xinhua) — Chang’e-1, China’s first lunar probe, impacted the moon at 4:13 p.m. Beijing Time (0813 GMT) Sunday, said sources with the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense. The satellite ended its 16-month mission Sunday when it hit the lunar surface at 1.50 degrees south latitude and 52.36 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}