Chinese aerospace advances put on display in Switzerland
Print Edition
AN exhibition focusing on China’s Lunar Exploration Program opened on Saturday in the Swiss city of Basel, highlighting some of the major achievements of China’s aerospace industry.
As part of the Baselworld 2018 Show, the exhibition was presented jointly by China’s Chang’e Aerospace Technology (Beijing) and Swiss watchmaker TAG Heuer.
“We feel honored to take this opportunity to demonstrate the achievements of CLEP, which is of great significance to the development of China’s aerospace industry,” said Xu Xingli, general manager of Chang’e Aerospace.
Since the year 2004, when the CLEP officially started, Xu said, China has made significant progress in the exploration of the moon. “In 2007, China’s first lunar probe Chang’e-1 was successfully launched. Chang’e-1 is the first lunar probe to transmit back the most complete 3D map of the lunar surface, marking the milestone of China becoming one of the countries with outer space exploration capability,” he said.
Since the second phase of the CLEP being approved and initiated in 2008, Chang’e-2 and Chang’e-3 lunar probes were successfully launched and they fully completed their missions.
Xu added that China’s important progress in the past decade also includes sending Chang’e-2 lunar probe directly into the Earth-moon transfer orbit in 2010, the soft landing and patrol survey on an extraterrestrial celestial body by Chang’e-3 in 2013, and the successful landing of the return and re-entry test spacecraft in the scheduled area in 2014.
Zuo Wei, deputy chief designer of CLEP Ground Application System, said: “CLEP represents the painstaking efforts of everyone involved for over a decade.”
In the next step, Zuo added, “China plans to implement the Chang’e-4 lunar mission this year, and this will be the first-ever soft landing and roving survey on the far side of the moon.”
According to the scientist, the biggest challenge for Chang’e-4 mission is that humans on the Earth cannot communicate directly with the far side of the moon. To solve this problem, she said, China plans to launch a relay satellite in May to enable communication between the Earth and the far side of the moon.
The Chinese scientist also revealed that the Chang’e-5 will be launched in 2019 and it will be the first in the world to use unmanned lunar orbital rendezvous and docking mode to achieve lunar surface sampling return.
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