China's Chang'e-4 team honored gold medal by British aerospace society

China's Chang'e-4 lunar landing mission team was awarded the world's only Team Gold Medal of the year at an annual award ceremony held by the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) in London on Monday.

The award is also the first presented to a Chinese project by the RAeS since its founding 153 years ago.

Academician Wu Weiren, chief designer of the lunar exploration project, attended the ceremony with other team members. He expressed his gratitude to the RAeS and the prize committee and welcomed more countries and organizations to conduct international exchanges and cooperation with China in space, to jointly contribute to human space exploration and scientific discoveries.

China's Chang'e-4 mission team was awarded the world's only Team Gold Medal of the year by the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) in London, UK, Monday. /CCTV Photo

The lander and the rover of China's Chang'e-4 lunar probe woke up last Thursday for their 12th lunar day on the far side of the Moon. The probe has spent 322 days working on the far side of the Moon, and the rover has traveled 318.62 meters on the virgin territory.

During its working period, the lunar surface neutron and radiation dose detector, low-frequency radio frequency spectrometer and other scientific payloads on the lander will continue scientific exploration of the lunar surface environment.

The panoramic camera, lunar radar, infrared imaging spectrometer, neutral atom detector and other scientific payloads on the rover will carry out scientific exploration at different detection points.

Launched on December 8, 2018, China's Chang'e-4 lunar probe successfully landed on the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on January 3 this year, marking the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the Moon. It collected data, based on which the research team has made important scientific discoveries, including the reconstruction of the trajectory of the probe's descent from the far side of the Moon, the precise location of the landing site, and the topography, structure, composition and other geological information of the landing zone.

The RAeS, founded in 1866, is one of the oldest professional organizations of aeronautics and astronautics in the world. The academy established annual awards to recognize teams and individuals who have made outstanding achievements in aerospace worldwide.