Landing Site Selection and Overview of China’s Lunar Landing Missions

• Published in: Space Science Reviews
• Main Authors: Liu, Jianjun, Zeng, Xingguo, Li, Chunlai, Ren, Xin, Yan, Wei, Tan, Xu, Zhang, Xiaoxia, Chen, Wangli, Zuo, Wei, Liu, Yuxuan, Liu, Bin, Liu, Dawei, Zhou, Qin, Ouyang, Ziyuan
• Other Authors: National Natural Science Foundation of China, Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, China's Lunar Exploration Program
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2020
• Subjects: Space and Planetary Science; Astronomy and Astrophysics; Aitken; South Pole; The Landing; South pole
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11214-020-00781-9; http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11214-020-00781-9.pdf; http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00781-9/fulltext.html

Abstract Landing site selection is of fundamental importance for lunar landing mission and it is closely related to the scientific goals of the mission. According to the widely concerned lunar science goals and the landing site selection of the ongoing lunar missions; China has carried out the selection of landing site for a series of Chang’ E (CE) missions. Under this background, this paper firstly introduced the principles, process, method and result of landing site selection of China’s Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP), and then analyzed the support of the selected landing sites to the corresponding lunar research. This study also pointed out the outcomes that could possibly contribute to the key lunar questions on the basis of the selected landing sites of CE-4 and CE-5 such as deep material in South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, lunar chronology, volcanic thermodynamics and geological structure evolution history of the Moon. Finally, this approach analyzed the development trend of China’s follow-up lunar landing missions, and suggested that the South Pole Region of the Moon could be the landing site of high priority for the future CE missions.