Chang'e-3 Lunar Rover Landing Slated For 13:40 UTC Saturday

savuporo writes "The Chinese Chang'e-3 probe will be landing on the moon [Saturday], 13:40 UTC. CCTV is likely to carry the event live as they did for initial launch. According to technical overview of the mission scenario and instruments, the landing will be fully autonomous with active landing hazard avoidance, which is the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing. More real-time updates can be found on Twitter with ChangE3 hash tag and NASASpaceFlight forums live event section."

Steaming video link

[Zanadou]

There's some good live coverage of it here as of right now: http://english.cntv.cn/live/p2p/index.shtml [english.cntv.cn]

Re:successful landing

[condition-label-red]

Solar panels are opening, everything going well!

Live feed [english.cntv.cn]

Successfully landed

[david.given]

CCTV's live coverage showed a textbook landing and solar array deployment, including some very shiny live pictures from the descent imager. Next steps are self-testing, instrument deployment and releasing the rover, which they've said will take up to 24 hours. Although I'd imagine that they'll release images from the panoramic mast camera as soon as possible.