Lunar team wins international recognition

China's scientists and engineers involved in the Chang'e 4 lunar exploration mission were awarded the Team Gold Medal of the United Kingdom's Royal Aeronautical Society on Monday in London, according to the China National Space Administration.

It was the first time the British institution－which was founded in 1866 and is the oldest aerospace society in the world－h(huán)ad ever conferred a medal on a Chinese space program, the administration said in a statement on Tuesday.

Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's Chang'e lunar programs and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and representatives from the Chang'e 4 mission team took part in an award ceremony in London on Monday. He thanked the society for the medal and said China looks forward to more exchanges and cooperation with the international space community, the statement said.

At a meeting on Monday with Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to the UK, at the Chinese embassy in London, Wu said China wishes to open comprehensive cooperation with the UK and other countries in space fields like lunar and Mars explorations and asteroid missions, according to the Chinese embassy.

Liu said he hopes that scientists from China and the UK could deepen their exchange and collaboration in space research and education to further benefit people worldwide, the embassy said in a news release.

The Chang'e 4 robotic probe, which consists of an unmovable lander and the Yutu 2 rover, was lifted atop a Long March 3B rocket in early December at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province, marking the country's fourth lunar exploration and the world's first expedition to the far side of the moon, which never faces Earth.

The probe made a soft landing on the far side on Jan 3 and then released the Yutu 2 to roam and survey the landing site in the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest and deepest known basin in the solar system.

Currently, the lander and the rover are in their 12th lunar-day working session. The Yutu 2 has traveled nearly 320 meters on the lunar soil.

The scientific tasks of the Chang'e 4 mission include low-frequency radio astronomical observation and surveying the terrain and landforms around the landing site. As no probe had ever landed on the far side before Chang'e 4, all scientific information obtained during the mission would be new to the world.

China's next lunar probe, Chang'e 5, will weigh about 8.2 metric tons and will be the largest and heaviest lunar probe ever built by the country. It will consist of four components－an orbiter, a lander, an ascender and a re-entry module.

The probe will be sent by China's largest carrier rocket, the Long March 5, from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province in the near future and will collect lunar samples and bring them back to Earth. If the Chang'e 5 mission succeeds, China will become the third nation to retrieve lunar samples, after the United States and Russia.