Xinhua confirmed on 10 April that Chang'e 7, China's four-element lunar south-pole mission, is locked for H2 2026 launch, with August cited by programme experts as the working target. The spacecraft arrived at Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on 9 April aboard an Antonov An-124 . Chang'e 7 carries an orbiter, a lander, a mini-hopping probe, a rover, and LILEM (Lunar Dust and Electric Field Instrument), a Russian payload from the Space Research Institute RAS.
The target is the rim of Shackleton crater, the same lunar south-pole zone as NASA's Artemis crewed programme. Only a limited set of sites support sustained operations, because they need near-continuous sunlight for power, line-of-sight to Earth for communications, and walking distance to permanently shadowed craters for water-ice prospecting. Both national programmes converged on Shackleton independently.
With Artemis III restructured in February to a low Earth orbit rendezvous , the first US crewed arrival shifts to Artemis IV. First arrival sets the physical baseline: where the rover places its ground-truth measurements, where the orbiter positions its relay, which shadowed crater the hopper samples. All of that becomes the prior data every subsequent mission reconciles against.
