Out of all missions to the moon or its orbit carried out in the past 20 years, China has flown almost half. This is including the latest mission - Chang'e 5 - to launch tomorrow. The robotic lander is expected to collect rocks and return them to Earth.
The last moon mission that drew a lot of international attention was the landing of a Chinese space craft on the dark side of the moon in January of 2019 (launch date in December 2018), as our graphic shows. For the first time in history, a rover shed light into the workings of the moon’s far side that has been long shrouded in mystery. Chang’e 4 shot pictures of the side of the moon permanently turned away from Earth and examined its geology via radar and spectrometers. After Chang'e 3 in 2013, Chang'e 4 was already China's second successful rover mission to the moon.
But other nations haven’t looked on idly while the relatively new Chinese space agency was making headway. As , several other nations have ventured towards the moon in the last 20 years, a contrast to the early age of moon exploration in the 1960 and 1970s, when the U.S. and Russia were the world's only spacefaring nations.
Other than China, only India managed a rover program (if without a successful rover mission to-date). The U.S., most notably, proved the existence of small quantities of water at the moon’s south pole with a combined orbiter and impactor mission in 2009. The European Space Agency ESA, as well as the Japanese space agency accomplished their own successful moon orbits. While the EU was testing a new solar–powered ion drive, the Japanese carried out geological survey.
