Chang'e in second historic landing on far side of moon

China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon yesterday, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world's first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.

The landing elevates China's space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term missions and moon bases within the next decade.

The Chang'e-6 craft, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, touched down in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin at 6.23 am.

The mission is China's second to a lunar region no other country has reached and where landing is very difficult as you don't have line-of-sight communications.

The Chang'e-6 probe launched on May 3 on a Long March 5 rocket from Hainan, reaching the lunar vicinity a week later before tightening its orbit for a landing phase that experts have said is when the chance of failure is the highest.

Using a scoop and drill, the lander will aim to collect two kilograms of lunar material over two days.

The samples will be transferred to a rocket booster atop the lander, which will launch back into space, tag up with another spacecraft and return, with a landing in Inner Mongolia expected around June 25.

If all goes as planned, the mission will provide China with a pristine record of the moon's 4.5 billion-year history and yield new clues on the solar system's formation. It will also allow for an unprecedented comparison between the dark, unexplored region with the moon's better understood Earth-facing side.