I've had four cups of coffee today and it's not even 2pm, so bear with me, because I need to get something off my chest before I even get to the actual news.
Last Thursday, January 3rd, China's Chang'e 4 lander touched down on the far side of the moon. First time anything from Earth has ever done that, soft-landed and survived, on the hemisphere that never faces us. That's a genuinely big deal and I don't think it got nearly enough attention outside of space-nerd circles, probably because half the coverage buried the lede under Apple's revenue warning from the day before (more on that some other time, my Twitter feed is still recovering).
But here's my actual complaint. Every third headline I saw called it the "dark side of the moon." It is not dark. It gets just as much sunlight as the near side, on the exact same cycle. What it is, is the far side, the half that's permanently turned away from us because the moon is tidally locked to Earth. Same face toward us always, whether it's lit up or not. "Dark" in this context means unseen, unmapped, mysterious, not lightless, and I get that Pink Floyd did the branding work for us fifty years ago so it's an easy shorthand to reach for. But come on. If you're a tech or science outlet writing headlines for a living, you can spend the extra four letters. This isn't a niche pedantic point I'm inventing, it's the kind of thing that gets your comment section full of well-actually replies within ten minutes, and it happened, again, this week, to outlets that should know better.
Okay. Rant over. Onto the part that actually impressed me, which honestly isn't the landing itself, it's the relay satellite.
Because here's the problem with landing on the far side: you can't talk to it. Direct radio contact with Earth is impossible when there's an entire moon in the way. So back in May of last year China launched a separate satellite, Queqiao, and parked it out at the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point, a spot about 65,000 km past the moon where the gravity balances out just right so the satellite can sit there and see both the far side of the moon and Earth at the same time. Chang'e 4 talks to Queqiao, Queqiao talks to Earth. That whole chain had to work perfectly for any of this to happen, and it was sitting there quietly doing its job for seven months before the lander even launched. That's the kind of unglamorous infrastructure story I always want more of and almost never get, because "satellite parks itself at a gravitationally stable point and waits" doesn't make for much of a photo.
Speaking of photos, the first images that came back are kind of a letdown if you're expecting anything cinematic. Grainy, gray, mostly rocks and the lander's own shadow. Von Kármán crater doesn't look like much from a few meters up. I stared at one of them for a solid minute trying to find something interesting in it and mostly just found more rocks. Doesn't matter, scientifically. Nobody's ever gotten surface-level data from that region before, and the whole point of picking Von Kármán is that it's inside the South Pole-Aitken basin, one of the oldest and deepest impact craters in the solar system, so whatever soil samples and readings come out of this over the next lunar day are going to be genuinely new information, not just a nicer camera pointed at familiar ground.
I remember being maybe eight years old with one of those library books about the moon, the kind with the diagram showing why we only ever see one face of it, and being weirdly bothered that there was a whole half we'd literally never seen a picture of. Apparently that stuck with me longer than I realized, because I was refreshing space Twitter at 1am on a Thursday like it was a sports score.
CES starts Tuesday and I already know I'm going to spend the next week wading through press releases about smart mirrors and 8K TVs nobody asked for. Getting this out of my system now felt necessary.