The rocket carrying the Chang'e 3 lunar probe was docked at the launch pad at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China on Sunday.
Preparations to launch China's first robotic expedition to the moon's surface entered their final hours on Sunday as engineers filled fuel tanks of a rocket that will carry the Chang'e 3 spacecraft and "Jade Rabbit" rover.
The rocket to take the Chang'e 3 craft into space was scheduled to lift off on Monday at 1:30 a.m. local time from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China. Jiang Jie, an engineer on China's lunar program, told state news media that if any problems foiled that schedule, mission controllers aimed to launch later on Monday or over the following two days.
If the mission succeeds, China will be the third country, after the United States and Soviet Union, to achieve a "soft" landing on the moon, one that allows a craft to operate after descending. "Hard" crash landings are easier, and China crashed a craft into the moon in 2009. The last soft landing on the moon by any country was by the Soviet Union in 1976.
"We've made every preparation possible," Chen Hongmin, an engineer at the mission control center in Beijing, told the China News Service, a state-run news agency.
Especially since China first sent an astronaut into orbit above the Earth, in 2003, space feats have featured in the Communist Party's efforts to promote itself as a vehicle of patriotic technological accomplishments. Preparations for the latest launch have been accompanied by similar propaganda from state-run television and newspapers. Two earlier Chang'e probes, in 2007 and 2010, orbited the moon to take pictures.
If the Chang'e 3 mission follows the plan, a craft carrying the six-wheeled rover called Jade Rabbit, or Yutu in Mandarin Chinese, will take about five days to get near the moon and enter orbit, and the landing craft carrying the rover will descend to the surface on Dec. 14, according to the European Space Agency, which is helping the mission. The rover, which received its name after an online vote, will spend three months exploring the moon, sending images and data back to Chinese scientists.
A later Chang'e mission in several years is intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon. The Chinese government has also said it is studying whether to send an astronaut to the moon, but no official plans have been announced.
Chang'e is the name of a Chinese goddess of the moon in an ancient myth.
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