Main Engine Cut Off

After a successful launch last week from Wenchang, Chang’e-5 completed its outbound leg of its trip and has settled into lunar orbit.

Andrew Jones is the person to follow if you want to keep up with this mission. And I recommend you do, because it’s about to get even more exciting: it appears that they’ll be going for a landing tomorrow, Sunday, November 29 at 20:30 UTC.

Most of what we know about the mission is coming from unofficial sources doing all sorts of sleuthing to suss out whatever they can. One particularly cool example is a video that was downlinked and decoded by independent satellite trackers last week, showing a solar panel shining in the sunlight while the spacecraft was headed towards the Moon.

Let’s hope we see some more official information during the landing attempt tomorrow. As always with China, I won’t count on it, but they did have pretty good live coverage of the launch, so maybe there’s a shot.