This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, keto, paleo, Mediterranean, how do these diets affect your metabolism?

But first, a moon goddess and a jade rabbit are now actively exploring the far side of the moon.

China's latest moon lander and rover, both named after previous Chinese moon missions.

They made history touching down this week in the Van Carman Crater, part of the moon's

oldest, deepest basin, and it's a technical feat that marks a new frontier in space exploration

and Chinese exploration.

Here to talk about it, and more selected short subjects in science is my guest, Maggie Kerth Baker,

senior science reporter at 538.com.

Welcome back, Maggie.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Let's go to that first story, that China's moon landing on the far side of the moon.

Yeah, so this is the first human spacecraft to land on the part of the moon that we can't see from Earth.

It's not technically the first human spacecraft to hit that part of the moon.

That would be Ranger 4, but that doesn't really count because it crashed there unintentionally after a system failure in 1962, and we didn't get any data from it. So this is the first intentional landing on the

far side of the moon. We've heard of course Pink Floyd call it the dark side of the moon,

but it's not really dark. No, it's not. In fact, you could argue that the side we see is sort

of the dark side because one of the things that makes these two sides different is that the side we see is sort of the dark side, because one of the things

that makes these two sides different is that the side of the moon that we see most of the

time has these really big, smooth, dark patches, the face of the man in the moon, right?

The other side is a lot more pockmarked, a lot more lumpy, and a lot paler all over. And that seems to be because

when these ancient asteroid impacts were sort of shaping what we see on the moon today,

they unleashed these lava flows on the side of the moon that faces us. So those lava flows

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