Apollo, also called the Apollo basin, is a large impact crater located on the far side of the Moon, in the southern hemisphere. This class of formation is known as a peak ring basin, which has a single interior topographic ring or a discontinuous ring of peaks with no central peak. in 1970 it was officially named after the Apollo missions by the International Astronomical Union.
The Chang'e 6 spacecraft landed within Apollo basin in 2024, collected samples of the surface, then brought them to Earth for analysis.
Geology
Apollo is a double-ringed walled plain (or basin) whose inner ring is roughly half the diameter of the outer wall. It dates to the Pre-Nectarian period of the lunar geologic timescale.
thumb|460px|The craters L. Clark (LC), Chawla (C), D. Brown (DB), M. Anderson (MA), McCool (M), Ramon (R), and Husband (H). [[Lunar Orbiter 5 image.]]
{| class="wikitable"
! style="background:#eeeeee;" |Crater
! style="background:#eeeeee;" |Coordinates
! style="background:#eeeeee;" |Diameter
! style="background:#eeeeee;" |Name source
|-
|Chawla
|
|align="center"|15 km
|Kalpana Chawla
|-
|D. Brown
|
|align="center"|15 km
|David McD. Brown
|-
|Husband
|
|align="center"|29 km
|Richard D. Husband
|-
|L. Clark
|
|align="center"|16 km
|Laurel B. S. Clark
|-
|McCool
|
|align="center"|21 km
|William C. McCool
|-
|M. Anderson
|
|align="center"|17 km
|Michael P. Anderson
|-
|Ramon
|
|align="center"|17 km
|Ilan Ramon
|}
Three of the crater names include the respective astronaut's first initials to distinguish them from the existing craters called Anderson, Brown and Clark.
Robotic exploration
China launched the Chang'e 6 robotic mission on 3 May 2024, which seeks to return the first lunar sample from the Apollo Basin on the far side of the Moon. This is China's second lunar sample return mission, the first was the Chang'e 5 mission that returned lunar samples from the near side of the Moon four years earlier. The Chang'e 6 lander also carried a rover named Jinchan which conducted infrared spectroscopy of the landing site and imaged the Chang'e 6 lander on the lunar surface. The lander-ascender-rover combination separated from the orbiter and returner before landing in the southern mare of the Apollo basin on 1 June 2024 at 22:23 UTC; its precise landing location is near lunar coordinates
After the probe collected far-side regolith samples and placed it on the ascender, the latter probe segment launched back into lunar orbit on 3 June 2024 at 23:38 UTC. The ascender docked with the Chang'e 6 service module (the orbiter) in lunar orbit at 06:48 UTC on 6 June 2024 and subsequently completed the transfer of the sample container to the Earth return module at 07:24 UTC on the same day. The orbiter left lunar orbit on 20 June 2024 with the atmospheric re-entry module that landed in Inner Mongolia with the collected samples on 25 June 2024.
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