It’s been 50 years since the first man touched the Moon surface on that day of 1969. Since then other missions succeeded in this task but, after 1972, no one ever touched our satellite again. On the 3 of January, at 2.26 UTC, a Chinese mission, code name Chang’e 4, landed in the Von Karman crater, located in the far side of the Moon. The lander had a special payload onboard: a miniature lander, some scientific equipment to collect samples and, above all, a life form. This time thou, its not a human being, but a bunch of cotton sprouts that, together with other seeds, insect eggs and yeast, were sealed in a 3 kg cylindrical container to recreate an earth like environment. The aim of this experiment was to create a biosphere with the plants producing oxygen to make life possible for the insects that would have produced carbon dioxide to create the photosynthesis. The results would have been pivotal to understand the effect of radiation and low gravity on an ecosystem. Furthermore, these experiments can be taken as a starting point to create an ecosystem during longer space exploration missions, even with human crew.
These enormous achievements, however, have to wait because the experiment was stopped due to some technical problems. 213 hours after the landing, in fact, temperatures dropped to minus 52°C, because of the so called lunar night. The container, in fact, couldn’t withstand this kind of climate, so the heating system broke and lead to the death of the cotton plant that was growing inside it.
Despite this problem, Chinese scientists claim that the mission was a great success and that the amount of data collected are enough to give us a better understanding of how other life forms react in the harsh environment that is the space. The miniatured rover taken with the lander, also explored an area of the moon completely untouched by any other human vehicle till now and his data will help the next mission planned for this year. The Chinese national space administration (CNSA) claimed that after this success, another mission called Chang’e 5 will be launched this year.
The final aim of the Chinese is to bring a manned mission on the moon surface and possibly build an outpost for stable life on the moon within 2030s. These achievements are made even more astonishing if we think that our species learned to fly only a century ago. Nowadays the scientific discoveries are bringing the human kind to a level of advancement never seen before; we are almost ready to make the big leap anticipated by Armstrong himself. Interstellar travels are slowly becoming reality, and maybe we will soon be ready to cross the last frontier: space.
Matteo Bramati, 5 B Tecnico
