Chinese probe sends back first snap of ‘dark’ side of the moon

The Chang'e-4 lunar probe, seen through the monitor at Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing. AP

BEIJING — China’s burgeoning space program achieved a first on Thursday: a landing on the so-called dark side of the moon.

Three nations — the United States, the former Soviet Union and more recently China — have sent spacecraft to the near side of the moon, which faces Earth, but this landing is the first-ever on the far side.

The China National Space Administration said the 10:26 a.m. touchdown of the Chang’e 4 craft has “opened up a new chapter in human lunar exploration.”

A photo taken at 11:40 a.m. and sent back by Chang’e 4 shows a small crater and a barren surface that appears to be illuminated by a light from the lunar explorer. Its name comes from that of a Chinese goddess who, according to legend, has lived on the moon for millennia.

The landing highlights China’s growing ambitions to rival the US, Russia and Europe in space and more broadly, to cement the nation’s position as a regional and global power.

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The first image of the moon’s far side taken by China’s Chang’e 4 probe.AP

“The space dream is part of the dream to make China stronger,” President Xi Jinping said in 2013, shortly after becoming China’s leader.

In year-end wrap-ups, Chinese media and officials hailed the Dec. 8 launch of Chang’e 4 as one of the nation’s major achievements in 2018. The landing on Thursday was announced to the public by state broadcaster CCTV at the top of the noon news.

“On the whole, China’s space technology still lags behind the West, but with the landing on the far side of the moon, we have raced to the front,” said Hou Xiyun, a professor at Nanjing University’s school of astronomy and space science.

He added that China has Mars, Jupiter and asteroids in its sights: “There’s no doubt that our nation will go farther and farther.”

In 2013, Chang’e 3, the predecessor craft to the current mission, made the first moon landing since the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976. The United States is the only country that has successfully sent a person to the moon, though China is considering a crewed mission too.

For now, it plans to send a Chang’e 5 probe to the moon next year and have it return to Earth with samples — also not done since the Soviet mission in 1976.

The moon’s far side isn’t always dark but is sometimes called the dark side because it faces away from Earth and is relatively unknown. It has a different composition than the near side, where previous missions have landed.

Chang’e 4, a combined lander and rover, will make astronomical observations and probe the structure and mineral composition of the terrain above and below the surface.

“The far side of the moon is a rare quiet place that is free from interference from radio signals from Earth,” mission spokesman Yu Guobin said, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. “This probe can fill the gap of low-frequency observation in radio astronomy and will provide important information for studying the origin of stars and nebula evolution.”

One challenge of operating on the far side of the moon is communicating with Earth. China launched a relay satellite in May so that Chang’e 4 can send back information.

China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, becoming only the third country to do so after Russia and the US. It has put a pair of space stations into orbit and plans to launch a Mars rover in the mid-2020s. Its space program suffered a rare setback last year with the failed launch of its Long March 5 rocket.

Wu Weiren, chief designer of the China Lunar Exploration Project, called the landing a trailblazing milestone.

“Building a space power is a dream that we persistently pursue,” he said in an interview with CCTV at the Beijing Aerospace Flight and Control Center. “And we’re gradually realizing it.”

2018 wasn’t even close to the worst year ever

Feeling down? Struggling to cope? Does life feel like a “Game of Thrones”? Well, perhaps your worries really are just first-world problems.

Throughout history, our ancestors have had more pressing concerns. Finding wild weather a problem? How about 18 straight months of fog? Supermarket prices getting too high? How about watching all your crops wither and die?

Constantly catching some new bug? How about contending with the Black Plague? Sick of government leadership slip-ups? How about the collapse of civilization itself?

Put it all together, and you get a date: 536 AD.

Harvard University medieval historian Michael McCormick has set out to find out just how bad things were, and what caused it all. He’s come up with some answers.

“It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year,” McCormick says.

It was the darkest moment of the Dark Ages. Now we know why. And when things started to get better again.

Blank and pitiless as the sun

Times weren’t great. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed 60 years earlier when Emperor Romulus was defeated by the Germanic warlord Odoacer.

Without the central rule of law, Rome’s old provinces throughout Europe became increasingly isolated. Infrastructure such as aqueducts, public baths and roads were failing. The highways were thick with brigands. Local strongmen surged forward to fill the power vacuum.

But things were about to get much, much worse.

McCormick told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that 536 may not have been the exact worst year — but it was the year things fell apart.

The next decade would be a living hell. The results of his study were published in the journal Antiquity. It was as if the gods had abandoned Europe, China — and much of the land in between. A mysterious fog rolled over Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia.

It did not lift.

For 18 months it sat there — plunging the lands into darkness.

“And it came about during this year that a most dread portent took place,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year.”

It was just the start. The following decade would be the coldest recorded for at least 2,300 years. But, in 536, snow would fall in summer. Crops withered and died. People starved — en masse. What caused it all has long been unknown.

But a 1990s analysis of the growth of tree rings during the era proved the historic records: The summers around 540 AD were certainly very cold, severely stunting trees’ growth.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

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Rome’s Western Empire may have collapsed. But the Eastern Empire still stood. Emperor Justinian the Great seemed firmly ensconced. He was in the 10th year of his — until then — prosperous reign.

Then, the skies grew dark.

“And it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear nor such as it is accustomed to shed,” Procopius described.

Elements of the thriving network of international trade established over the past 600 years lingered. Nations and provinces still relied upon each other for vital resources.

After 536, this would not last. But it would contribute to making things worse.  The bubonic plague began its relentless march. Among people and animals already reeling from starvation, the Black Death would extract a terrible toll. And the disease-carrying parasites would spread far and wide, carried by ships, wagons and travelers.

In 541, the Roman port of Pelusium in Egypt became the first major population center to be brought to its knees by the plague. The following Plague of Justinian killed up to half of the entire population of the Eastern Roman Empire — bringing on its collapse.

Europe, the Middle East and much of Asia fell into economic and societal collapse that would last just over a century.

It was what would commonly become known as the Dark Ages. Entire peoples would uproot and swarm across Europe, seeking new lands to plant their crops.

It was the era that spawned legends such as that of King Arthur — with lingering memories of a lost golden age, and a yearning for a hero to bring back the good times.

Some revelation is at hand

How things got so bad, so fast, has long puzzled historians.

Was the Roman Empire simply too corrupt to survive? Were the “barbarians” stampeding and ravaging their way across Europe? And what was the cause of that choking cloud of fog?

McCormick and his team say they now have an answer.

Careful analysis and dating of ice cores exposed evidence of an event that sparked the global catastrophe. Volcanic ash. Vaporized glass. Sulfur. Bismuth. All were blasted high into the sky, creating a thin film reflecting sunlight back into space.

Glaciologist Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine says the ash appears to have come from a volcano in North America, or perhaps Iceland. It blew — big time — in early 536. It spewed ash across the entire Northern Hemisphere. But that wasn’t the end of it.

The volcano erupted twice more — in 540 and 547. The consequent ash clouds served only to revitalize the climate-changing impact of the first. But the ice core reveals more.

Each tree-ring-like layer of ice acts like nature’s logbook of what was happening at the time.

Among those layers associated with 640 AD was found a sudden spike in particulate lead. And historians knew where that came from.

Industry had revived. Economies had fired up. The wheels of trade had begun to roll again. And greasing it all was the flow of freshly minted silver coins — the processing of which produced the lead pollution.

The darkness drops again, but now I know

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Penny minted around 660Antiquity Publications; T. Abramson

McKormick’s team found microscopic particles of volcanic glass in a Swiss glacier dating from 536. Ice cores and tree rings from Greenland and peat bog cores from elsewhere in Europe also contained similar particles.

Indications are they came from a volcano in Iceland, but the samples are too small to be certain. The researchers say they want to examine cores from lakes in Europe and Iceland to identify more fallout from this catastrophic event.

Once identified, there may be clues as to why this particular eruption proved so devastating. Wherever the volcano, the jet-stream winds propelled the plume across Europe and Asia. Beneath it, the chilled fog formed.

The ice also tells the tale of the end of this dark age.

Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck of the University of Nottingham says in Antiquity that the ability to precisely date sample cores was a major breakthrough for historians. Ice cores are proving to be a fantastic resource for inferring what was happening at any given point in history. Each snowfall lands on top of another, building up, layer by layer, ice sheets that capture snapshots of what was in the air for each given season.

The cores reveal the smelting of lead ore to extract silver produced a surge in pollution in 640, and again in 660.

Economies were thriving once again. Gold was becoming scarce for coins. So silver found itself suddenly in great demand.

“This unambiguously shows that, alongside any residual pool of Roman bullion and imported metal, new mining facilitated the production of the last post-Roman gold coins — debased with increasing amounts of silver — and the new silver coinages that replaced them,” the researchers wrote.

Loveluck added: “It shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time.”

It was a golden age set to last 700 years. Then the ice cores tell another tale. Once again, lead vanished from the air. Between 1349 and 1353, the Black Death once again swept through Europe.

Once again economies collapsed. Crops failed. But it wouldn’t prove as bad as 536.

Millennials are resolving to save more in 2019: study

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Times have been good for the economy — but many young Americans are worried about their finances.

And they are resolving to do better in 2019.

Those are some of the conclusions of a recent study by Principal Financial Group of how various groups view next year.

The survey found many young people are out to save and budget more effectively.

“Nearly all American millennials (94 percent) plan on making financial resolutions in 2019,” the report said. “As the year winds down, more Americans are reflecting on where they busted their budgets in 2018, and importantly, what they’re committed to correcting in 2019.”

What do they plan to fix?

Twenty-nine percent said they spend too much on dining out, followed by 27 percent who overspend on groceries.

In 2019 about half of Americans are “aiming to save more each month,” the survey said.

Respondents also said they want to reduce their monthly spending (38 percent) and pay off credit card debt (29 percent).

One adviser says it’s crucial to save more to prepare for potential bad times ahead.

“They should have five to six months of cash on hand to prepare for the potential period of unemployment,” said Aaron Schindler with Wealth Advisory Group in New York City.

The average millennial — those roughly between the ages of 18 and 35 — isn’t very different from the rest of Americans. Eight of 10 US adults of all ages say they will make a financial resolution for 2019, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education.

More than half, an NEFE survey said, “indicated that saving money was their biggest cause of financial stress, beating debt (46 percent) as the top financial stressor of the year.”

NEFE President Billy Hensley said that having endured the recent economic roller-coaster ride, many people are buckling down.

“Over the past year, [amidst] uncertainty and volatility surrounding the stock market, rising interest rates, as well as concern about an economic slowdown, we are seeing incredible determination from Americans who want to take control of their finances and improve their financial well-being in 2019,” Hensley said.

Hensley said savers should not stress out, but “start small” and set up an automatic savings plan.

Having some savings, added Schindler, is “important because the law of physics tells us that it is inevitable that the economic expansion has to end.”