China Shoots for Moon's Far Side

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The Queqiao spacecraft and two radio-astronomy experiments launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in western China on 21 May.

SPACE China shoots for Moon’s far side Queqiao probe carries technologies that could one day explore the Universe’s dark ages.

BY DAVIDE CASTELVECCHI The first of the two experiments is the lower-frequency signatures from the dark ages. Netherlands–China Low-Frequency Explorer For at least part of its orbit, Queqiao will be hina has taken its first major step in (NCLE). It will remain attached to Queqiao, which eclipsed by the Moon, as seen from Earth, which a groundbreaking lunar mission. On will linger around ‘Earth-Moon L2’ — a gravi- could benefit the NCLE because its antennas 21 May, a probe launched from Xichang tational resting point about 60,000 kilometres will be further shielded from the radio noise that CSatellite Launch Centre to head beyond the beyond the Moon constantly leaks from our planet. Still, observa- Moon, where it will lie ready to act as a commu- that tracks the Moon’s “The experiment tion time and the bandwidth for sending data nications station for the Chang’e-4 lunar lander. orbit around Earth. is an important back to Earth will be limited. And because The nation hopes that the lander will, later this The Dutch-built first step toward Queqiao is designed primarily as a data-relay year, become the first craft to touch down on the NCLE experiment investigating the station (its name comes from a folktale about far side of the Moon. will try to exploit the dark ages and magpies that form a bridge across the sky), it The relay probe, named Queqiao and relative quiet there to cosmic dawn.” is not optimized for radio astronomy. That designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, measure radio waves means it will be challenging, if not impossible, also carries two pioneering radio-astronomy with frequencies between about 1 megahertz for this demonstrator mission to detect the experiments. Both are proof-of-principle mis- and 80 megahertz, coming from the Solar dark-ages signal, says Heino Falcke, a radio sions designed to test technologies for exploring System, the Galaxy and beyond. astronomer at Radboud University Nijmegen in a period in cosmic history known as the dark Much of this frequency band is blocked by the Netherlands who is the experiment’s science ages. These first few hundred million years of Earth’s atmosphere, but cosmologists expect leader. Nonetheless, the NCLE “is pioneering the Universe’s existence, before galaxies and it to contain information from the dark ages. and an important first step toward investigating stars began to form, are all but impossible to Around the upper end of this band also fall the the dark ages and cosmic dawn”, says Jack Burns, study from Earth. But the spectrum of radiation ‘cosmic-dawn’ signals from the first stars, which an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado from this age — when matter was distributed lit up around 200 million years after the Big Boulder who is leading a proposal for a NASA nearly uniformly across space as a thin, cold Bang, and were apparently detected for the first mission with similar objectives. haze — could reveal information about the time in Australia earlier this year. Other experi- To avoid jeopardizing the Queqiao probe, distribution of ordinary matter compared with ments are trying to replicate those results — but mission control will deploy the NCLE’s dark matter in the Universe. the NCLE is testing technologies for identifying antennas only after the Chang’e-4 lander’s

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mission is completed, says Marc Klein Wolt, PUBLISHING a Radboud astronomer who is NCLE’s man- ager. But the NCLE might go on collecting data for several years, he says. SATELLITE BREAK-OFF Open-access drive The second experiment that launched with Queqiao consists of two smaller satel- lites called Longjiang-1 and Longjiang-2, spreads in Europe which will detach from the mothership and orbit the Moon. Built by researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, Negotiators share tactics to broker new deals with publishers. the instruments will test technology for a radio-astronomy technique called very- BY HOLLY ELSE struck similar deals, and Switzerland will start long baseline interferometry (VLBI). This to negotiate its first open-access contracts this approach combines data from multiple radio old efforts to push academic publishing year. A survey by the Brussels-based European antennas to create images of much higher towards an open-access model are gain- University Association, published in April, resolution than would be possible with a ing steam. Negotiators from libraries reported that, last year, 11% of negotiating single dish. Band university consortia across Europe are consortia in Europe made deals that took into Falcke and others have long studied the sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of account open-access publishing costs, but 63% possibility of doing VLBI with a large array contracts that could see more articles appear planned to do so in the future. of lunar orbiters — or on the lunar surface outside paywalls. And inspired by the results On 2 May, negotiators from countries — to map variations across the sky in signals of a stand-off in Germany, they increasingly across Europe agreed to align their bargaining from the dark ages and cosmic dawn. Klein declare that if they don’t like what publishers strategies at a closed meeting in Berlin attended Wolt says that his team might experiment offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access by the European Commission’s special envoy with combining data from NCLE with those at all. On 16 May, a Swedish consortium for open access, Robert-Jan Smits. According from the two lunar orbiters, and even from a became the latest to say that it wouldn’t renew to Gerard Meijer, one of the German negotia- radio antenna on the Chang’e-4 lander itself. its contract, with publishing giant Elsevier. tors present, consortia are “frustrated” by the The Chang’e-4 mission is another step in Under the new contracts, termed ‘read lack of progress in talks and feel the limits of China’s ambitious lunar-exploration pro- and publish’ deals, libraries still pay subscrip- partnerships between institutions and large gramme, which aims to establish a Moon tions for access to paywalled articles, but their publishers “have been reached. It is up to us base in the next decade, and to begin human researchers can also publish under open-access now to act, and to step out of these negotiations exploration in the 2030s. The lunar lander terms so that anyone can read their work for if these are going nowhere,” he says. will carry a rover and was originally designed free. Advocates say such agreements could The meeting was the latest in a string of as a back-up for Chang’e-3, which in 2013 accelerate the progress of the open-access events in which negotiators from different became the first craft since 1976 to soft- movement. Despite decades of campaigning for countries swapped tactics. “More and more land (rather than crash-land) on the Moon. papers to be published openly — on the grounds people are willing to share their experiences,” Chang’e-4 has now been repurposed, and that the fruits of publicly funded research says Matthijs van Otegem, director of the the mission’s main scientific goal is to study should be available for all to read — scholarly library at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the geology of the hidden side of the Moon, publishing’s dominant business model remains and chair of the open-access working group at which is pockmarked with many more small to publish articles behind paywalls and collect the Association of European Research Librar- craters than the familiar near side. subscriptions from libraries (see ‘Growth of ies (LIBER) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The lander carries several experiments, open access’). But if many large library consortia In September last year, LIBER published a including a sealed ecosystem, built by strike read-and-publish deals, the proportion of list of principles to guide negotiators seeking Chongqing University, which will test open-access articles could surge. to change their deals. These include ending whether potato and thale-cress (Arabidopsis) “There is a serious ground for change across non-disclosure agreements that publishers seeds sprout and photosynthesize as silk- Europe,” says Koen Becking, chief negotiator customarily place on contracts (which would worm eggs hatch and the worms produce for the VSNU, a consortium of 14 institutes in enable negotiators to compare deals in differ- carbon dioxide. Another experiment will the Netherlands. In 2014, the VSNU was the ent countries) and not agreeing to price hikes measure the radiation that will confront first national group to negotiate a subscrip- without open-access agreements in place. future astronauts who visit the lunar sur- tion deal that included rights for its scholars A key driver behind the activity in Europe is face. The rover, which will separate from to publish all of their work openly. It has since the European Commission’s goal that, by 2020, the lander to move around the surface of the agreed several more that include varying levels all research will be freely accessible as soon as Moon, will carry instruments such as a solar- of open publishing. Consortia in Austria, the it is published. Dutch negotiators have been wind detector built by a Swedish team. ■ United Kingdom, Sweden and Finland have tasked with brokering a deal that meets