China Readies First-Ever Mission To The Moon

China is preparing to launch its first Moon rover, with the vehicle named Jade Rabbit in a nod to Chinese folklore.

The name derives from an ancient Chinese myth about a white rabbit which lives on the Moon as the pet of Chang'e, a lunar goddess who swallowed an immortality pill.

China's official Xinhua news agency said the rocket carrying the probe would be launched in early December.

The probe will carry out a number of experiments

China has previously sent two probes to orbit the Moon, with controllers sending the first of them crashing into the lunar surface at the end of its mission.

"China has named its first moon rover Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, following an online poll," Xinhua added.

The rabbit's outline is said to be visible on the Moon's surface, similar to the Western concept of the "man in the Moon".

Beijing sees its military-run space programme as a marker of its rising global stature and growing technological might, as well as the ruling Communist Party's success in turning around the fortunes of the once poverty-stricken nation.

It has ambitious plans to create a permanent space station by 2020 and eventually send a human to the Moon, but its technology currently lags behind that of the US and Russia.

Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the Moon rover project, told Xinhua that the ancient beliefs had their origins in the marks left by impacts on the lunar landscape.

"There are several black spots on the Moon's surface, our ancient people imagined they were a moon palace, osmanthus trees and a jade rabbit," he said.

China's first lunar probe, Chang'e-1, was launched in 2007.

The next, Chang'e-2, began its journey three years later and after orbiting the Moon was sent on a mission into deep space to monitor an asteroid.

That probe is "expected to travel as far as 300 million km from Earth, the longest voyage of any Chinese spacecraft", Xinhua quoted an official as saying.

That remains a small fraction of the distance travelled by the US Voyager-1, launched in 1977, which left the solar system and has travelled nearly 19 billion kilometres away from its home planet.

Chinese social media users welcomed the name. "I look forward to the jade rabbit visiting the moon palace, go Chinese aerospace!" wrote one poster on Sina Weibo, a service similar to Twitter.

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