January 3, 2019

Chang'e 4

Chang'e 4 makes the first soft landing on the Moon's far side

For the last hundred metres the lander stopped and hovered, identifying hazards and choosing its own landing spot — and its signals could only reach Earth by bouncing off a satellite called Magpie Bridge.

10:26 Beijing time, Von Kármán crater

China's Chang'e 4 began powered descent on 3 January 2019 at 10:15 Beijing time, from about 15 kilometres above the lunar surface. CNSA described the sequence as about 12 minutes long.

The lander hovered at roughly 100 metres to identify hazards and selected a comparatively level spot on its own, touching down at 10:26 Beijing time (02:26 UTC) on the floor of Von Kármán crater. It was the first successful soft landing on the Moon's far side.

Talking to Earth through Magpie Bridge

The far side generally has no line of sight to Earth, so Chang'e 4 sent the first close-range image of that hemisphere home through Queqiao — "Magpie Bridge" — a relay satellite already operating in a halo orbit around the Earth–Moon L2 region.

"Far side" means the hemisphere that generally faces away from Earth, not a permanently dark one. Nor was this humanity's first look at it: Luna 3 photographed the far side in 1959.

Yutu-2 down the ramp before midnight

Controllers separated the rover Yutu-2 from the lander later the same day. At 22:22 Beijing time it drove down the ramp onto the surface.

By the end of 3 January, a functioning lander and rover were operating inside a crater in the South Pole–Aitken basin; the landing site was later reconstructed as 177.5991° E, 45.4446° S.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The date and touchdown time are well documented. The defensible first is the first successful soft landing on the lunar far side; “first artificial object to land” is less precise terminology.