Which country became the first to bring soil from the dark side of the moon in June 2024 ?

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Correct — A, China. The mission was Chang'e-6, and it returned the first samples ever collected from the far side of the Moon. It lifted off on a Long March 5 on 3 May 2024, its lander touched down on 1 June 2024 in the southern mare of the Apollo crater inside the South Pole-Aitken basin, it collected 1,935.3 grams of lunar material by drilling and scooping, and the return capsule came down at Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia on 25 June 2024, roughly fifty-three days after launch. Every gram of Moon rock previously held on Earth — the American Apollo hauls and the Soviet Luna returns alike — had come from the near side, so this was a first for any country and not merely a first for China. The stem's phrase 'dark side of the moon' is popular usage rather than astronomy, and understanding why is the most valuable thing on this card. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth: it takes almost exactly as long to turn once on its axis as it takes to complete one orbit, so the same hemisphere faces us permanently. That produces a far side, never visible from Earth — but not a dark one, because over a lunar month it receives just as much sunlight as the near side does. Being permanently out of sight is an engineering problem rather than a lighting one, since a craft down there has no line of sight to Earth. China solved it by first parking a relay satellite, Queqiao-2, launched on 20 March 2024, and routing all of Chang'e-6's communications through it.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) USA — the country holding by far the most lunar material, since the Apollo programme brought back roughly 380 kilograms of rock and soil between 1969 and 1972, a total no other nation has approached. That very success is why the option is tempting. But every one of those samples was collected on the near side, and no American mission has ever returned material from the far side, so the specific claim in the stem does not belong to the United States.  (c) India — a genuinely strong recent lunar record, and the option most likely to catch an Indian candidate on patriotic instinct. Chandrayaan-3 achieved a soft landing near the lunar south pole in August 2023, a first of its own kind, and Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe reached the surface in 2008. But all of these were orbiters, landers and rovers; India has flown no sample-return mission of any kind and has never brought lunar material to Earth.  (d) France — has no independent lunar landing or sample-return programme at all. France is a leading space power within Europe, through the European Space Agency, the national agency CNES and the Ariane launch vehicles, but its lunar involvement is in instruments and cooperation rather than in landing craft, and it has never returned material from any body in the solar system.

Concept: Bringing material back from another world is a far harder thing than landing on it, which is why the sample-return club is so small. A lander must survive a descent; a sample-return mission must additionally collect material, lift off again from a body with its own gravity, rendezvous or fly home, and survive re-entry. The lunar far side raises the difficulty further, because the Moon's own bulk blocks radio contact with Earth, so any far-side mission has to be preceded by a relay satellite placed where it can see both the landing site and the Earth. China built that infrastructure deliberately and in sequence: Queqiao-1 in May 2018, then Chang'e-4 in January 2019 for the first soft landing on the far side in the Von Kármán crater region with the Yutu-2 rover, then Chang'e-5 in December 2020 returning 1,731 grams from near Mons Rumker on the near side, then Queqiao-2 in March 2024, and finally Chang'e-6. The science reason for going to the far side is that the two hemispheres are strikingly unalike — the far side has a thicker crust and very few of the dark basaltic maria that cover much of the near side — and material from the South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest impact basin on the Moon, bears directly on why.

State PCS 2024 Q17 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q17 — Science & Technology PYQ with Answer