Nasa to the East for lunar mission link up

NASA has announced it is collaborating with its Chinese counterpart on a lunar mission, amid US warnings against sharing technology with the country.

The US space agency has been in discussions with the China National Space Administration (CNSA) to collaborate on lunar landing research after gaining approval from Congress.

The collaboration requires Nasa to navigate a strict legal framework in the US aimed at preventing a technology transfer to China, and comes during a period of strained relations between the two countries.

It follows reports that the US government is on the verge of indicting the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei for allegedly stealing trade se- crets from US companies. China successfully landed a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon earlier this month – the first country to achieve such a feat.

The probe, Chang’e-4, carried a set of instruments aiming to take detailed measurements of the terrain as well as conducting a biological experiment. In a statement, Nasa said it planned to observe “a signature of the landing plume” of Chang’e-4 using its lunar orbiter with the aim of understanding more about the Moon’s surface. The announcement confirmed a similar state- ment made earlier in the week by Wu Yanhua, the deputy chief commander of China’s Lunar Exploration Program.

NASA shared information from a US satellite while China told the Americans about the latitude, longitude and time of the landing “in a timely manner,” he said.

The hope was that Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) could observe the historic touchdown of the Chinese lander on Jan 3.

Nasa provided the planned orbit path of LRO to China, but it turned out the spacecraft was not in the right place at the right time.

“For a number of reasons, NASA was not able to phase LRO’s orbit to be at the optimal location during the landing, however NASA was still interested in possibly detecting the plume well after the landing,” the agency said.

The collaboration requires Nasa to navigate a legal framework ... preventing a technology transfer to China