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China’s upcoming lunar probe, Chang’e-6, will carry payloads from the European and French space agencies, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation announced Tuesday.
The planned payloads are two scientific instruments for the investigation of the moon’s surface, the company reported through a post on the Sina Weibo platform, similar to Twitter.
Such international cooperation stems from two memorandums of understanding that the China National Space Administration signed last week with the European Space Agency and the Center National d’Etudes Spatiales, the French space agency.
The European equipment is a negative ion analyzer that can be used for fundamental research in planetary science, while the French instrument is a detector to measure radon gas and its decay products on the moon.