China Is Sending A Flying 6-Legged Robot To The Moon For A Groundbreaking Space Mission

As a part of its grand plans for outer space domination, China intends on sending another Chang'e probe into space next year. The mission this time is to search for water potentially frozen in the far side of the moon after previous Chinese probes had found potential for further exploration. Discovering frozen water will obviously prove huge from a scientific perspective, but could also change the lunar resources game among other major space players.

In 2026, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) will embark on its most ambitious project to the moon yet. The new mission is to find frozen water in the lunar south pole with the help of the next generation Chang'e-7 probe. This move stems from water being found in soil samples recovered by Chang'e-5's 2020 mission to the same area of the moon. While last year's Chang'e-6 consisted of a lander and a rover, Chang'e-7 will be CNSA's most advanced and complex yet—it'll feature a six-legged "flying" robot on top of orbiter, lander, and rover units.

Unlike NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter that flew as a traditional helicopter could, the yet unnamed Chinese robot will technically use its six bendable legs to leap from one area to another, almost like a space grasshopper. Locomotion will be a combination of crawling, leaping, and soaring (thank you, low-G), which will enable the robot to traverse sunlit areas, as well as craters kissed by darkness. 

Powering the robot will be a combination of solar panels/batteries and a specialized fuel mix, although apparently the mission brief for the robot is a short one: our source states that the plan is for it perform a little over three leaps into shadowed areas. There's a possibility that CNSA actually means about three leaps per day, but we could be mistaken here.

The primary job of the robot is to collect data on potential water ice deposits using onboard cameras and sensor, handing off sample collection to the rover (or future projects). 

While water has already been found in lunar soil samples by various space agencies, scientists believe that frozen water is the key to uncovering resources that can used for moon colonization (which happens to be high on China's to-do list) and future space missions to other planets. Of course, all this boils down to, pun intended, the quantity and quality of lunar water ice, assuming there's any in the first place.