China's Chang'e 6 mission to the moon was launched on Friday, May 3. Chang'e 6 will land and bring back lunar rock and soil samples from the far side of the moon (43S 154W), about 53 days after launch. Landing is expected around May 29, when the sun rises over the landing site. The solar-powered lander will finish its surface mission before the Sun sets 14 days later.
From the far side, Chang'e will communicate with earth via the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, which was launched on March 20 and is currently located in an elliptical lunar orbit of 200×16,000 km at 62.4° inclination.
Here is a map showing the location of the Chang’e 6 landing site. Note that 0° longitude faces earth.
Here is an animation of the Change-5 mission that which brought back rock samples from the moon in 2020. The Chang'e 6 spacecraft hardware and mission procedures are very similar, except for the landing location on the far side of the moon and the use of the Queqiao-2 relay satellite to communicate with earth.
We send our best wishes to the ambitious Chang’e 6 mission, given the low success rate of the many lunar landing missions over the past few years.
Now, let’s land the solution to today’s puzzle composed by noted Italian chess composer Alberto Mari (1882 – 1953) in 1929.
P.S.
The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. ET.
It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the minimum number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But there are no hard-and-fast rules; feel free to post comments as you please.
P.P.S. I am on travel this week and may not be around to converse when the diary publishes on Tuesday.