What is the nature of space science?

Half a century ago, Neil Armstrong took one small step for a man on the moon, but a giant leap for mankind, but it has been 45 years since a person set foot on the moon. NASA announced on Monday a plan to put a rover on the moon by 2023. It would be a key intermediate step to achieve the goal of landing humans there by 2028.

Earlier this year, China made history by landing a rover on the far side of the moon for the first time. While only one country's name appeared in the headlines, Chinese scientists stressed the fact that the mission involved lots of international cooperation. In the coming years, China is gearing up to send more missions to the moon, and maybe even build an International Moon Village with partners around the world.

CGTN host Tian Wei talked to Wu Ji, the director of the National Space Science Center at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He said collaboration is in the nature of space science and there are many levels of collaboration.

"The lowest level is just exchange data, so we are exchanging some of the lunar exploration data with NASA. But that is no hardware collaboration, and if you go one step further, you have hardware exchange and we put our hardware on board the European or foreign satellite, and they put their payload or hardware instrument on board of Chinese space missions. For example, our lunar lander is on the far side of the moon in Chang'e-4. They are European payload. They are European scientific instrument. So this is a higher level," said Wu.

"And if you go even higher, then we will build a satellite together," Wu continued. "So this is Smile. On the Smile collaboration, we are building our part and European part is built in Europe. So we will integrate those two parts together and launch it on European launcher."

When it comes to the nature of high-level cooperation, Wu believes trust is the keyword, "so this collaboration is not just in one goal, we had Double Star collaboration. They have their instrument on board of the satellite, so we build trust already. And in between those ten years, we have lots of talks, and every year we have bilateral meetings, so we selected joint missions Smile together. All things have to be coordinated."

Speaking of the new frontiers of space science, people are so fascinated by the universe. In the past 20 years, so much information has come in, and it is ever changing. We never really understand dark matter of whether there is intelligent life in the nearby galaxy. So this is fascinating, and technology is developing so fast that we have more ways to find answers to all those questions. We don't even really know if there is any more life in our solar system.

We know about Earth, but even on Mars, we have not really confirmed if life, even very preliminary life, was there or not. Finding out that is just one of many new frontiers to explore, according to Wu.

(CGTN)