This week witness the publication of results gathered by two probes, China’s Chang’e 4 on the Moon, and America’s InSight on the Mars. The Chinese rover lifted off back in January 2019, and InSight in late November the same year. Chang’e 4 marks the second successful lunar rover and the first from any country to reach the Moon’s far side – the edge which was never noticeable from Earth.
Chang’e 4 Lunar and InSight Mars Exploration Missions Explained
Chang’e 4’s goal, other than proving China’s technological prowess, is to examine the geology of Van Karman crater in the southern hemisphere of the Moon’s. For reaching that, the lander is equipped with a ground-drilling radar that can inspect many meters down. That radar displays three various bits of rock, and the top two have 12 meters dense and the lowest one 16 meters.
Beneath that, the signal is too dim to find out what is happening there. As for the highest part, it is made of regolith – smashed rock that is the result of zillions of small meteorite collisions over billion years, and which covers almost all the Moon’s ground. The other two, distinct by the roughness of the particles within them, are most likely discrete discharge from separate close collisions that happened in the Moon’s early history.
The InSight mission, on the other hand, is planned to reach deeper than Chang’e 4. It is packed with tools developed to analyze and estimate the heat level from Mars’ core. Also, InSight’s seismographer registered 174 marsquakes between the rover’s landing and the end of the September 2019.
The most powerful were recorded between magnitudes three and four. These quakes are a vital source of data about a planet’s core. From all, this can be concluded that those layers have depth and composition. So far, both the Chinese and American mission triumphed with their tasks.
