China's space agency wants to be the first to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, as it announced plans to launch the Chang'e 4 mission by 2020.
According to BBC News, a Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) official confirmed these plans to CCTV, the nation's state TV broadcaster. Zou Yongliao said the Chang'e 4 spacecraft would be designed to gather geological data on the side of the moon facing away from the Earth.
"If we can can place a frequency spectrograph on the far side, we can fill a void," Zou, A member of the CAS' moon exploration department, said.
In 2017, China aims to become the third nation to send a spacecraft to the moon and return physical samples to Earth, after the United States and Russia. However, the country's future mission is far more ambitious, as it has never been accomplished.
Michael Brown, an observational astronomer at Monash University in Melbourne, told Al Jazeera the main complication with what China will attempt in landing a probe on the far side of the moon will be communication.
"The communication problem will be solved by having a spacecraft orbiting the moon to relay radio signals from the far side of the moon back to earth," he said. "This shouldn't be too difficult a problem to solve, given spacecraft orbiting Mars regularly relay signals from the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers that are driving around on that planet.
"The Chinese space program has demonstrated that they can land on the moon and build communications satellites, so their goal to land on the far side of the moon by 2020 is certainly feasible."
