Chunlai Li

Chinese Academy of Sciences | CAS

The Mars Surface Composition Detector (MarSCoDe) is a remote sensing instrument mounted on the front deck of the Zhurong rover in China’s Tianwen-1 mission. The MarSCoDe adopts Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), along with Short Wave Infrared Spectroscopy (SWIR) and a telescopic micro-imager, to perform in situ detection of the chemical c...

To address questions about the multiple lunar nearside–farside dichotomies and to provide new insights into both the early impact history of the Solar System and the geological evolution of the Moon, the Chang’e-6 (CE-6) landing zone has been selected to lie within the lunar farside South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin in the southern part of the Apollo b...

Orbital observations suggest that Mars underwent a recent ‘ice age’ (roughly 0.4–2.1 million years ago), during which a latitude-dependent ice-dust mantle (LDM)1,2 was emplaced. A subsequent decrease in obliquity amplitude resulted in the emergence of an ‘interglacial period’1,3 during which the lowermost latitude LDM ice4–6 was etched and removed,...

The Chang'e-5 (CE-5) mission, the first return of lunar samples to Earth since the Apollo and Luna missions more than 44 years ago, landed on one of the youngest mare basalt units (1.0-3.0 Ga, based on superposed crater counts), located at middle latitude (~43°N) far from previous landing sites. On December 17, 2020, the sample capsule returned to...

On 14 May 2021 (UTC), China’s first Mars rover, Zhurong, has opened a new frontier of in-situ Mars exploration when it landed in the vast terrain of southern Utopia Planitia. The first year of Zhurong’s journey has provided close-up views of the landscape. Traversing south, the rover was able to visit several bright dunes and witness serveral venti...

Landforms on the Martian surface are critical to understanding the nature of surface processes in the recent past. However, modern hydroclimatic conditions on Mars remain enigmatic, as explanations for the formation of observed landforms are ambiguous. We report crusts, cracks, aggregates, and bright polygonal ridges on the surfaces of hydrated sal...

China’s first Mars rover, Zhurong, landed on the southern region of Utopia Planitia, Mars, on 14 May 2021 (UTC). Zhurong is equipped with the Mars Surface Composition Detection Package (MarSCoDe), which analyzes the Martian surface’s material composition. Composed of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), short-wave infrared spectroscopy (SWI...

The Rover-mounted Subsurface Penetrating Radar (RoSPR) is one of the scientific payloads onboard China’s first independent Mars exploration mission, Tianwen-1. The radar aims to characterize the thickness of the upper Martian soil and investigate the subsurface stratigraphy by collecting and processing the data. This article is mainly divided into...

The deep space exploration activities represented by lunar and planetary space exploration expand human's cognition of "physical space" from "earth space" to "deep space scene" such as Moon， Planet， and even interplanetary space. Deep space environment is both related and significantly different from earth space or planetary space. How to construct...

Taking the Chang'e-4 and Chang'e-5 landing areas as the study areas, this study extracts the geological unit information from the regional USGS geological map, as well as the feature information such as topography and geomorphology, material composition and mineral abundance from Chang'e-2 DOM and DEM, wide angle camera (WAC) and Kaguya multi-band...

The western maria of lunar near-side are widely covered with late-stage mare basalts. Due to the lack of returned samples, the mineralogy of the late-stage basalts was previously speculated as having high abundance of olivine based on remote sensing observation. However, here we show that Chang’E-5 (CE-5) lunar soil samples, the ground truth from p...

Mars Orbiter Subsurface Investigation Radar (MOSIR) is carried by China's first Mars probe, Tianwen‐1 orbiter, investigating the Martian subsurface stratification. Surface clutter from topography off‐nadir will overlap with the subsurface echoes, which affects the recognition of Martian subsurface reflections. Surface clutter simulation can effecti...

The Lunar Mineralogical Spectrometer (LMS) is one of the main payloads on the Chang’E-5 (CE-5) lunar probe, belonging to the China Lunar Exploration Program. The scientific objective of the LMS is to explore the mineralogical composition and search for evidence of -OH/H 2 O in the sampling area. The LMS consists of an optomechanism unit, a dustproo...

The permittivity of the lunar regolith is crucial for the further processing and interpretation of radar data. The conventional hyperbolic fitting method ignores the antenna height and spacing and has a significant error at the shallow depth. For the new method that considers the layout of the antenna, the influencing factors have not been studied....

On May 15, 2021, Tianwen-1 successfully landed in the Utopia Planitia of Mars, and its rover Zhurong began to carry out an in-situ science exploration of the Mars surface. To determine the location, driving direction, and exploration targets of the rover, it is necessary to provide decision support for the in-situ science exploration of the rover a...

The distribution range, time-varying characteristics, and sources of lunar water are still controversial. Here we show the Chang’E-5 in-situ spectral observations of lunar water under Earth’s magnetosphere shielding and relatively high temperatures. Our results show the hydroxyl contents of lunar soils in Chang’E-5 landing site are with a mean valu...

Chang'e-3(CE-3) has been the first spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 in 1976. The spacecraft arrived at Mare Imbrium on December 14, 2013 and the same day, Yutu lunar rover separated from lander to start its exploration of the surface and the subsurface around the landing site. The rover was equipped, among other...

As a hyperspectral imager aboard the orbiter "HX-1" of China's first Mars mission, the Mars Mineralogical Spectrometer (MMS) is designed with hyperspectral and multispectral operation modes to survey the mineral types and their distribution on the surface of Mars, and to study the overall chemical composition and evolution history of Mars. The mult...

As a hyperspectral imager aboard the orbiter “HX-1” of China’s first Mars mission, the Mars Mineralogical Spectrometer (MMS) is designed with hyperspectral and multispectral operation modes to survey the mineral types and their distribution on the surface of Mars, and to study the overall chemical composition and evolution history of Mars. The mult...

The Yutu‐2 rover of Chang'E‐4 encountered four special rocks along its path. The onboard Visible and Near‐infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) collected their spectral data at close range. In this work, we focus on the visible/near‐infrared image cubes captured by the VNIS. Simple classification was performed using the K‐means algorithm based on th...

We report analysis results of the reflectance spectra (0.48 to 3.2 μm) acquired by the Chang’E-5 lander, which provides vital context of the returned samples from the Northern Oceanus Procellarum of the Moon. We estimate up to 120 parts per million (ppm) of water (OH + H2O) in the lunar regolith, which is mostly attributed to solar wind implantatio...

The new Wuqing 70 m radio telescope is firstly used for the downlink data reception in the first Mars exploration mission of China, and will be used for the other deep space communications and radio astronomical observations in the future. The main specifications and measurement results of some properties in X-band are introduced in this paper, suc...

As part of the Tianwen-1 mission, the Zhurong rover successfully touched down in southern Utopia Planitia on 15 May 2021. On the basis of the new sub-metre-resolution images from the High Resolution Imaging Camera on board the Tianwen-1 orbiter, we determined that the Zhurong rover landed at 109.925° E, 25.066° N at an elevation of −4,099.4 m. The...

This work presents the results of the Lunar Regolith Penetrating Radar (LRPR), installed at the bottom of the Chang’E-5 (CE-5) lander, which is the first antenna-array radar deployed for the investigation of an extraterrestrial body. Radar imaging results unveiled a hyperfine structure for the top 2.5-m-thick lunar regolith with an unprecedented hi...

The Visible and Near-infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) is one of the scientific payloads onboard the Yutu-2 lunar rover of the Chang’E-4 mission. Based on Acousto-Optic Tunable Filter (AOTF) dispersion, a moving platform and a calibration unit, the VNIS was designed for lunar surface observations of the far side of the Moon for composition explo...

The MOSIR (Mars Orbiter Subsurface Investigation Radar) is one of the scientific payloads carried by the Tianwen-1 orbiter. MOSIR conducted a ground experiment in the desert near Dengkou County, northern China, before the launch of the Tianwen-1 satellite. The MOSIR prototype was suspended from a hot air balloon and flew over a flat region at an al...

Data infrastructure systems such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Planetary Data System (PDS), European Space Agency (ESA) Planetary Data Archive (PSA)and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Data Archive and Transmission System (DARTS) archive large amounts of scientific data obtained through dozens of planetary exp...

Forty-five years after the Apollo and Luna missions returned lunar samples, China's Chang'E-5 (CE-5) mission collected new samples from the mid-latitude region in the northeastern Oceanus Procellarum of the Moon. Our study shows that 95% of CE-5 lunar soil sizes are found to be within the range of 1.40-9.35 μm, while 95% of the soils by mass are wi...

The lunar mineralogical spectrometer (LMS) is the primary scientific payload of the Chang’E-5 mission of the China Lunar Exploration Program. The LMS is responsible for the in situ spectral detection and analysis of the sampling areas of interest on the Moon’s surface. The LMS needs to adapt to a wide range of temperature conditions, varying betw...

Accurate relative permittivity is essential to the further analysis of lunar regolith. The traditional hyperbola fitting method for the relative permittivity estimation using the lunar penetrating radar generally ignored the effect of the position and geometry of antennas. This paper proposed a new approach considering the antenna mounting height a...

High-resolution optical cameras have always been important scientific payloads in Mars exploration missions, which can obtain detailed images of Martian surface for the study of geomorphology, topography and geological structure. At present, there are still many challenges for Mars high-resolution images in terms of global coverage, stereo coverage...

The Tianwen-1 mission is China’s first Mars exploration mission. To complete the scientific objectives of “orbiting, landing, and patrolling” in one mission, thirteen instruments for acquiring multi-disciplinary data are configured. The data products with rich ancillary data and flexible structures will facilitate the data application. To integrate...

Spectrometers based on acousto-optic tunable filters (AOTFs) have several advantages, such as stable temperature adaptability, no moving parts, and wavelength selection through electrical modulation, compared with the traditional grating and Fourier transform spectrometers. Therefore, AOTF spectrometers can realize stable in situ measurement on the...

Accurate assessments of surface temperatures on the Moon are important for understanding the physical properties of the lunar surface regolith and thermal effects on the reflectance spectra beyond 2 μm. The local time resolved spectral measurements of the same region were used to estimate the surface temperature at the Chang'E-4 landing site. The r...

The Mars Mineralogical Spectrometer (MMS) is a hyperspectral imager onboard the Mars orbiter of Tianwen-1, China’s first Mars exploration mission. MMS consists of 4 subassemblies: an Optical Sensor Unit (OSU), an Electronics Unit (EU), a Calibration Unit (CU), and a Thermal Control Accessories (TCA). With a 0.5 mrad IFOV and a 416-sample cell array...

China’s Chang’e-4 (CE-4) mission is the first human lander/rover mission on the far side of the Moon. Its probe is composed of a lander, rover, and the Queqiao relay satellite. Queqiao was successfully launched on May 21, 2018, and entered the halo orbit of the L2 point on June 14, becoming the first satellite connecting the Earth and the Moon’s fa...

Landing site selection is of fundamental importance for lunar landing mission and it is closely related to the scientific goals of the mission. According to the widely concerned lunar science goals and the landing site selection of the ongoing lunar missions; China has carried out the selection of landing site for a series of Chang’ E (CE) missions...

Impact craters, which can be considered the lunar equivalent of fossils, are the most dominant lunar surface features and record the history of the Solar System. We address the problem of automatic crater detection and age estimation. From initially small numbers of recognized craters and dated craters, i.e., 7895 and 1411, respectively, we progres...

The Low-Frequency Radio Spectrometer (LFRS) is a scientific payload onboard the Chang'e-4 lunar lander launched in December 2018. The LFRS provides in-situ measurements of the low-frequency radio phenomena on the far-side of the Moon for the first time in human history. To evaluate the performance of the LFRS, a series of ground experiments are con...

Due to its significance in astrobiology, assessing the amount and state of liquid water present on Mars today has become one of the drivers of its exploration. Subglacial water was identified by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) aboard the European Space Agency spacecraft Mars Express through the analysis of ec...

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Compared with hyperspectral remote sensing in visible-light, near infrared and short-wave infrared spectra, hyperspectral remote sensing in the thermal infrared spectrum has unique advantages, especially in the fields of mineral identification and pollution gas. At present, infrared hyperspectral imagers are rare and mainly airborne. In this paper,...

There are numerous algorithms that can be used to retrieve land surface temperature (LST) and land surface emissivity (LSE) from hyperspectral thermal infrared (HTIR) data. The algorithms are sensitive to a number of factors, where noise is difficult to handle due to its unpredictability. Although there is a lot of research regarding the influence...

The Chang'E-4 spacecraft successfully landed in Von Kármán crater inside the South Pole-Aitken basin on the lunar far side on January 3, 2019 and the Yutu-2 Rover has performed explorations on the lunar surface for nine lunar days as of September 2019. Our earlier analysis of the visible and near-infrared spectrometer measurements made by the Yutu-...

The South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin, located between the South Pole and Aitken crater on the far side of the Moon, is the largest confirmed lunar impact structure. The pre-Nectarian SPA basin is a 2400 × 2050 km elliptical structure centered at 53°S, 191°E, which should have exposed lower crust and upper mantle due to the enormous excavation depth. O...

Lunar soils gradually become mature when they are exposed to a space environment, and nanophase metallic iron (npFe0) generates within them. npFe0 significantly changes the optical properties of lunar soils and affects the interpretation of the remotely sensed data of the lunar surface. In this study, a correlation analysis was conducted between np...

On 3 January 2019, China’s Chang’E-4 (CE-4) successfully landed on the eastern floor of Von Kármán crater within the South Pole–Aitken Basin, becoming the first spacecraft in history to land on the Moon’s farside. Here, we report the observations made by the Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) onboard the Yutu-2 rover during the first two lunar days. We...

Impact craters, as "lunar fossils", are the most dominant lunar surface features and occupy most of the Moon's surface. Their formation and evolution record the history of the Solar System. Sixty years of triumphs in the lunar exploration projects accumulated a large amount of lunar data. Currently, there are 9137 existing recognized craters. Howev...

Chang’E-4 landed in the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin, providing a unique chance to probe the composition of the lunar interior. Its landing site is located on ejecta strips in Von Kármán crater that possibly originate from the neighboring Finsen crater. A surface rock and the lunar regolith at 10 sites along the rover Yutu-2 track were measured by...

Chang’E-4 (CE-4) was the first mission to accomplish the goal of a successful soft landing on the lunar farside. The landing trajectory and the location of the landing site can be effectively reconstructed and determined using series of images obtained during descent when there were no Earth-based radio tracking and the telemetry data. Here we reco...

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the pace of lunar exploration has accelerated, with more than a dozen probes having undertaken scientific exploration of the Moon. Prominent among these have been the robotic “Chang’E” (CE) missions of the China Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP). We discuss technological and scientific goals and achievements...

The Chang’e-4 (CE-4) lunar rover, equipped with a visible and near-IR imaging spectrometer (VNIS) based on acousto-optic tunable filter spectroscopy, was launched to the far side of the moon on December 8, 2018. The detection band of the VNIS ranges from 0.45 to 2.4 μm. Because of the weak reflection of infrared radiation from the lunar surface, a...

This paper introduces a new method of small lunar craters’ automatic identification, using digital orthophoto map (DOM) data. The core of the approach is the fact that the lunar exploration DOM data reveal contrasting highlight and shadow characteristics of small craters under sunlight irradiation. This research effort combines image processing and...