Telescope on China’s lunar lander still works after a year and a half

Ars Technica : In 2013, China became the third nation to place a spacecraft on the Moon’s surface when it successfully landed Chang’e 3 near the lunar north pole. The lander released a rover, Yutu, but it also held several other instruments, one of which was a UV telescope. In a paper posted to arXiv on 6 October, a team of researchers revealed that the telescope is still collecting and transmitting data. The telescope is relatively small, with an aperture of just 150 mm, and has primarily served as a test platform for future lunar observatories and robotic telescopes. To protect the instrument from lunar dust, the telescope’s doors close as the day/night border passes across the Moon’s surface; it is thought that the temperature change causes the dust to shift. Over the 18 months of the telescope’s operation, the researchers have seen no degradation in performance.