moon (Page 18)

China will not be launching a manned mission to the Moon in the foreseeable future, says Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China’s Moon exploration program. He wants to clarify earlier news reports in the Chinese media that said Beijing would be putting a man on the Moon by 2010 with the establishment of a Moonbase soon afterwards. “We will explore the Moon certainly,” says Ziyuan, “but with unmanned spacecraft. One of our goals is to bring lunar samples back to China for analysis. We are interested in the minerals on the Moon. We will prepare an unmanned spacecraft to do this.”
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China is planning to establish a base on the Moon to mine its mineral resources. Beijing has not yet put a human astronaut into space, but Chinese scientists say they expect to do so within three years.

Ouyang Ziyuan, a chief scientist with China’s Moon exploration program, says they are planning to launch a manned flight by 2005 and their first mission to the Moon in 2010. In March China successfully launched its third unmanned test flight of a Shenzhou space capsule. Only two countries – the former Soviet Union and the United States – have achieved manned space flight.
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Moon mush?a type of slush?exists beneath the surface of the moon, according to a team led by James Williams at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. New calculations developed by the British mathematician Augustus Love reveal how the Moon?s surface and interior react to the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun.
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