关键词: 月球背面, 月球南极 艾肯盆地, 嫦娥探月工程, 月球车, 月壤

Abstract:  Chang’E-4 successfully landed on the farside of the Moon, starting a new era of the lunar exploration. The landing site located within the largest and oldest impact basin on the Moon, the South Pole-Aitken basin, where many secrets about the lunar interior’s composition and early impacting history were hided. The region has been suffered a long period of 3.6 billion years asteroidimpacting and solar wind implanting, producing a layer of more than 10 m thick lunar soil (regolith). The lunar rover Yutu-2 traveled on the surface of lunar regolith, conducting the in situ exploration along the track. It acquired high resolution stereo photos with the onboard cameras, determined the thickness of the regolith and beneath crater ejecta and buried lava flows with the lunar penetrating radar, and measured the compositions of the soil and boulders on the surface with the visible and near infrared spectrometer. The asteroid impacting history of the landing region and the lunar interior’s composition were decoded from these data.

Key words: farside of the Moon, South Pole-Aitken basin, Chang’E missions of lunar exploration, lunar rover, lunar regolith