China's space program is celebrating yet another success.
Its moon rover, the so-called Jade Rabbit, it rolled onto the lunar surface after its first successful landing in nearly four decades.
Ivan Watson has more from Beijing.
China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover is now exploring the moon.
This vehicle detached itself from the larger Chang'e-3 lunar probe in the early hours Sunday Beijing time.
Now, the probe itself made a historic soft unmanned landing on the moon Saturday night Beijing time.
And it now puts China as the third country to accomplish this technological feat, coming after the U.S. and Russia.
It landed on the moon. Chang'e-3 is on the moon.
And we saw scenes of scientists from China's space agency celebrating, embracing each other at the moment that that lunar probe made its successful landing on the moon.
Now one of the missions of this lunar probe, which is partially solar-powered, it's a six-wheeled vehicle weighing about 140 kilograms...
one of its missions is to explore a part of the moon known as the Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows.
It's also tasked with looking beneath the surface of the moon using ground-penetrating radar, in part to search for possible valuable mineral deposits.
Now some experts tell CNN that they think the Chinese may be looking at the possibility at [of] future prospecting and mining missions to the moon.
The Chinese acknowledge that their space program is decades behind the U.S. and Russia, for example,
but this does seem to be a part of a much bigger strategy
that also involves establishing China's own global positioning system of satellites around the Earth and also building its own manned space station.
And that's very significant, because if everything goes according to plan,
when the International Space Station is decommissioned in 2020,
in the subsequent decade it will be the Chinese that will have the only manned space station orbiting around the Earth.