Chang'e 3 / Yutu

On the evening of 14 December 2013, with the descent broadcast live on Chinese television, a spacecraft did something no machine had done in 37 years: it landed softly on the Moon. Chang'e 3, named for the goddess who lives there in Chinese myth, dropped toward northern Mare Imbrium on a throttleable engine, then paused. Hovering roughly a hundred metres up, its cameras scanned the ground, the computer rejected boulder fields and craters, and the lander translated sideways to a safer spot before settling onto the dust at 13:11 UTC. Not since the Soviet Luna 24 mission of August 1976 had anything arrived on the Moon intact.

Hours later, two ramps unfolded from the lander's flank and a six-wheeled rover rolled down onto the regolith. Yutu, the Jade Rabbit, named through a public online poll after the rabbit who keeps the Moon goddess company, weighed about 140 kilograms and carried a design life of three months. China had become only the third nation to soft-land on the Moon, and the images of the gold-foiled lander and its little rover photographing each other under a black sky went around the world.

The science was quietly groundbreaking. The lander carried an ultraviolet telescope, the first long-duration astronomical observatory ever operated from the lunar surface, while Yutu's ground-penetrating radar profiled layered lava flows hidden hundreds of metres beneath Mare Imbrium. Yutu's drive system failed after its second lunar night following a short circuit, having covered 114 metres, but the immobilised rover kept transmitting for 31 months, ten times its design life, before falling silent in 2016.

Chang'e 3 was the opening move of a long game. Its backup spacecraft became Chang'e 4, the first lander on the lunar far side in 2019; Chang'e 5 brought back samples in 2020. A nation that had never touched the Moon in 2012 was, within a decade, setting the pace of lunar exploration.