An overview of the scientific payloads in Chinese Chang'e-3 lunar mission

摘要

Chinese Chang'e-3 (CE-3) spacecraft which included a lander and a robotic rover, landed successfully on moon at 13:11 Ground UTC on December 14, 2013. The scientific objectives of the spacecraft were to examine the texture, mineralogy, and structure of the local lunar terrain, to operate an ultraviolet astronomy telescope on the moon and images the distribution of He <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">+</sup> in Earth's plasmasphere, to determine the distribution and composition of minerals, rocks, and soils. Eight kinds of scientific payloads were chosen for CE-3 spacecraft, the lander and the robotic rover each had four scientific payloads, the Terrain Camera (TCAM), the Moon-based ultraviolet camera (MUVT), the Extreme ultraviolet camera (EUVC) and the Landing Camera (LCAM) were equipped on the lander, the Panoramic Camera (PCAM), the Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR), the Visible and Near-Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) and the Active Particle-induced X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) were installed on the robotic rover. This paper mainly introduces the key information on the scientific payloads principles, designs, instrument parameters and lunar surface initial experiment result.