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China has launched a relay satellite to prepare for a lunar rover mission planned for later in the year. The Queqiao spacecraft will establish a communications link between Earth and the landing mission, which looks set to launch in the next six months. The satellite was launched at 22:28 BST on Sunday (05:28 local time) from Xichang launch centre in the country's south-west. It will settle in an orbit about 455,000 km (282,555 miles) from Earth. This orbit will also take it more than 60,000 km from the lunar farside, where China will aim to put down with a lander...

Leadership: As our space program, once an example of American exceptionalism, now sits mainly in museums, Beijing's ambitious program takes another leap forward toward an eventual return of man to the moon. As the world unravels, efforts to leave it don't seem very newsworthy, and efforts by our strategic rivals to do what we did decades before seem redundant and almost irrelevant to more immediate concerns. Yet China's space program does matter, as it's part of that country's dream of world leadership and, yes, domination. It represents a commitment to world leadership that we have lost under this administration. Beijing...

The serious technical malfunction afflicting the life and continued operations of China’s Yutu moon rover since the start of its second Lunar Night time hibernation in late January 2014 has been identified as an inability to properly maneuver the life giving solar panels, according to a top Chinese space official. “Yutu suffered a control circuit malfunction in its driving unit,” according to a newly published report on March 1 by the state owned Xinhua news agency. “The control circuit problem prevented Yutu from entering the second dormancy as planned,” said Ye Peijian, chief scientist of the Chang’e-3 program, in an...

Yutu entered a controlled hibernation mode despite mechanical problems on Jan. 24 to weather the 14-day lunar night cycle, but should have woken up days ago. China's mission control has yet to offer an official statement of failture, though it did report that Yutu did not wake up on schedule and was not responding to stimuli.

Recent English information on the mission is scarce, but it’s been widely reported that the mission will include a lander in a six-wheeled rover. This Chinese news agency notes that planners expect to put up an astronomical telescope, test remote control between the moon and the Earth, and explore areas around the landing location. You can also read (dated) background information on the mission on the Chinese National Space Administration’s website.