HELSINKI — China’s Yutu-2 rover, part of the first ever mission to land on the far side of the moon, may have made its final tracks, NASA lunar orbiter images reveal.
China launched the Chang’e-4 lander and rover mission to the far side of the moon in late 2018, with the lander and Yutu-2 rover touching down in Von Kármán crater Jan. 3, 2019.
The latest Chinese media report on the progress of Yutu-2, in September 2024, stated that the six-wheeled, solar powered rover had driven a total of 1,613 meters. However, imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) reveals that Yutu-2 appears to have been stationary since March 2024.
“NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images the rover roughly once a month and those images let me track rover motion,” Phil Stooke, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Earth and Space Exploration at University of Western Ontario, told SpaceNews. “Unfortunately, there has been very little motion in the last year and apparently none at all since March 2024.”
“Up to about February 2023 the rover was moving about 7 or 8 metres every drive and typically about 40 m per lunar day. Suddenly the drives dropped to about 3 or 4 m each and only about 8 or 10 m per lunar day,” Stooke said in an email.
“That lasted until about October 2023, and then drives dropped to only 1 or 2 m each. In March 2024 Yutu 2 was resting just southwest of a 10 m diameter crater, and it’s been there ever since, as revealed by LRO images,” Stooke added.
The roughly 140-kilogram Yutu-2 was reported still functioning in September. A post from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) marking the sixth anniversary of the landing Jan. 3, celebrated the mission but did not provide an update on the status of either the lander or Yutu-2 rover.
Data accessed from China’s planetary data release system and posted on social media platform X by Sefer Yu show images captured by Yutu-2 in September 2024, showing its surroundings, the rim of Von Kármán crater and tracks indicating the rover’s drive route.
It is unknown what has brought Yutu-2 to an apparent halt. “At first I attributed the slow-down in 2023 to problems with the Queqiao relay satellite, which was apparently low on maneuvering fuel and being used sparingly to prolong its life,” Stooke wrote. “It was replaced by a new relay satellite early in 2024, primarily to support the Chang’e-6 sample return mission, but when that sample was brought to Earth the new relay would be available for Yutu-2. I thought the pace would pick up but it has not. This all suggests that Yutu-2 is no longer able to move.”
Lunar spacecraft face a harsh temperature and radiation environment, as well as facing mechanical degradation from the highly abrasive lunar regolith, and could face obstacles crossing challenging terrain.
Yutu-2 is the successor to the 2013 Chang’e-3 lunar nearside landing mission rover Yutu (Jade Rabbit). The earlier Yutu rover lost mobility during its second lunar day (approximately 14.5 Earth days) but continued to operate until 2016. Yutu-2 had a design lifetime of three months but has set a new record as the longest-lived lunar rover, surpassing the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 1 rover. Lunokhod 2 holds the record lunar drive distance at around 39 kilometers.
The Yutu-2 rover has discovered materials potentially from the moon’s mantle, shedding light on the lunar interior, provided insights into the composition of impact ejecta in the ancient South Pole–Aitken Basin, and the history of the region using a ground-penetrating radar.
The mission also paved the way for the 2024 Chang’e-6 lunar far side sample return mission, which also landed within the South Pole–Aitken Basin, by demonstrating a landing with the support of a relay satellite, named Queqiao (Magpie Bridge).
As the moon is tidally locked with the Earth, only the near side can be seen from the ground. This means lunar far side missions require a relay satellite to operate in an orbit taking it beyond the moon with respect to the Earth, allowing it simultaneous line of sight with both spacecraft on the far side of the moon and ground stations on Earth.
Yutu-2 is part of China’s wider, three-step lunar exploration program which intended to orbit, land on, and then collect samples from the moon. Chang’e-4 was the repurposed backup mission for the Chang’e-3 landing mission.
Having completed all of these steps, the country has approved further missions, with the Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 robotic lunar south pole missions scheduled to launch in 2026 and 2028 respectively. These two missions are described as precursors to an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), to be constructed in the 2030s. China aims to put its first astronauts on the moon before 2030.
