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China has launched its Jade Rabbit lunar rover 
HONG KONG — China’s latest display of ambition in space involves sending a Jade Rabbit roaming across the Bay of Rainbows.
A rocket blasted off from southwest China early Monday, carrying the country’s first robotic lunar rover, the Jade Rabbit, which will explore a plain on the moon that, despite its colorful name, is a dark expanse of hardened lava.
If successful, the Chang’e-3 mission will be China’s first “soft landing†on the moon — which allows a craft to operate after descending — and the first such landing by any country since 1976, when the Soviet Union sent a probe. The last American expedition on the moon’s surface was a manned visit in 1972. Chinese state-run television broadcast footage of the rocket’s untroubled launch and ascent into space, where the Chang’e-3 craft set off toward the moon.
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For the Chang’e-3 mission, the rover — a solar-powered, six-wheeled vehicle similar to ones the United States has sent to Mars — will spend three months exploring, using radar to collect data on rocks up to 328 feet below the surface, Ouyang Ziyuan, a senior consultant to the mission, told China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. A future mission that could take place in several years would be intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon.
A rocket blasted off from southwest China early Monday, carrying the country’s first robotic lunar rover, the Jade Rabbit, which will explore a plain on the moon that, despite its colorful name, is a dark expanse of hardened lava.
If successful, the Chang’e-3 mission will be China’s first “soft landing†on the moon — which allows a craft to operate after descending — and the first such landing by any country since 1976, when the Soviet Union sent a probe. The last American expedition on the moon’s surface was a manned visit in 1972. Chinese state-run television broadcast footage of the rocket’s untroubled launch and ascent into space, where the Chang’e-3 craft set off toward the moon.
>
> (several paragraphs of political crap)
>
For the Chang’e-3 mission, the rover — a solar-powered, six-wheeled vehicle similar to ones the United States has sent to Mars — will spend three months exploring, using radar to collect data on rocks up to 328 feet below the surface, Ouyang Ziyuan, a senior consultant to the mission, told China’s state-run Xinhua news agency. A future mission that could take place in several years would be intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon.
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