China's rover maps 1,000 feet of hidden 'structures' deep below the dark side of the moon

The farside of the moon, photographed by Apollo 13, hands upside-down over the blackness of space

Since it first landed in 2018, China's Chang'e-4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon — has been taking stunning panoramas of impact craters and sampling minerals from the moon's mantle. Now, the spacecraft has enabled scientists to visualize the layer cake of structures that comprise the upper 1,000 feet (300 meters) of the moon's surface in finer detail than ever before. 

Their results, which were published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal billions of years of previously hidden lunar history.