China’s space agency has had a busy year thus far, with a successful Moon landing and rover deployment as well as some pretty neat experiments that are offering scientists some interesting insights.
The country’s Chang’e 4 lander touched down on the far side of the Moon in early January, and while it’s been a long time since NASA sent anything to the lunar surface, the U.S. space agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has a pretty good view of it from above. Now, as China continues to break new ground on the Moon’s least-studied side, NASA took the opportunity to snap an image of the landing site where the Chang’e 4 mission touched down.
You would probably never guess that there’s actually a lunar lander in the image above, but it is indeed there. Unfortunately, the size of the lander and the distance at which the photo was snapped makes it pretty much impossible to pick out the lander among the various features littering the Moon’s surface, but NASA has us covered on that front.
“Because LRO was 330 kilometers (205 miles) to the east of the landing site, the Chang’e 4 lander is only about two pixels across (bright spot between the two arrows), and the small rover is not detectable,” NASA explains in a new blog post. “The massive mountain range in the background is the west wall of Von Kármán crater, rising more than 3,000 meters (9,850 feet) above the floor.”
Want a better look? Well you’re in luck!
Now that is one seriously tiny speck of high-tech hardware. For a sense of scale, NASA explains that the larger crater near the middle of the above image is a whopping 1,440 feet in diameter, making the pint-sized rover appears as just a couple of bright pixels in a sea of gray.
