Story highlights China makes public high-resolution photos taken by its lunar lander and rover 
 
 They show the moon's crust in vivid detail 
 
 It's a show of openness for the country's usually secretive space program 
 
 Beijing (CNN) China has released hundreds of high-resolution photos taken by its Chang'e-3 lunar lander and rover, showing the moon's surface in vivid detail. 
 
 The China National Space Administration made the images, video clips and scientific data available on its website in a rare show of openness for the country's usually secretive space program. 
 
 China sent its first unmanned lunar probe, the Yutu, or "Jade Rabbit," to the moon in 2013 as part of its Chang'e-3 mission, becoming only the third nation after the United States and Russia to land on the moon's surface. 
 
 Despite a shaky start to its mission, the Jade Rabbit is still working and sending images and data back to earth. 
 
 Read More ||||| Image caption New images show the probe viewed from the rover 
 
 The first robot rover to land on the Moon in nearly 40 years, China's Jade Rabbit, has begun sending back photos, with shots of its lunar lander. 
 
 Jade Rabbit rolled down a ramp lowered by the lander and on to the volcanic plain known as Sinus Iridum at 04:35 Beijing time on Saturday (20:35 GMT). 
 
 It moved to a spot a few metres away, its historic short journey recorded by the lander. 
 
 On Sunday evening the two machines began photographing each other. 
 
 A Chinese flag is clearly visible on the Jade Rabbit as it stands deployed on the Moon's surface. 
 
 Image caption Images of the rover taken from the lunar probe were released by the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre 
 
 Ma Xingrui, chief commander of China's lunar programme, declared the mission a "complete success". 
 
 The first soft landing on the Moon since 1976 is the latest step in China's ambitious space programme, says BBC science reporter Paul Rincon. 
 
 The lander will operate there for a year, while the rover is expected to work for some three months. 
 
 The Chang'e-3 mission landed some 12 days after being launched atop a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket from Xichang in the country's south. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The Jade Rabbit rover rolls off the lander and onto the Moon's surface, as Helen Fawkes reports 
 
 The official Xinhua news service reported that the lander began its descent on Saturday just after 1300 GMT, touching down in Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows) 11 minutes later. 
 
 "I was lucky enough to see a prototype rover in Shanghai a few years ago - it's a wonderful technological achievement to have landed," Prof Andrew Coates, from UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told BBC News. 
 
 Chang'e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1,900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210. 
 
 But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. 
 
 Chang'e-3 mission instruments On the lander: Optical ultraviolet telescope for astronomy 
 
 Ultraviolet camera to monitor space weather 
 
 Descent camera to monitor the landing On the rover: Two panoramic cameras 
 
 Engineering and navigation cameras 
 
 Arm-mounted alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to analyse chemical elements in rocks and soil 
 
 Infrared spectrometer to study minerals 
 
 Ground-penetrating radar to map the structure of lunar soil and crust down to several hundred feet True value of Jade Rabbit 
 
 The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour. 
 
 Its name - chosen in an online poll of 3.4 million voters - derives from an ancient Chinese myth about a rabbit living on the moon as the pet of the lunar goddess Chang'e. 
 
 The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night. 
 
 According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined. 
 
 "China's lunar programme is an important component of mankind's activities to explore [the] peaceful use of space," Sun Huixian, a space engineer with the Chinese lunar programme, told Xinhua. 
 
 After this, a mission to bring samples of lunar soil back to Earth is planned for 2017. And this may set the stage for further robotic missions, and - perhaps - a crewed lunar mission in the 2020s. 
 
 Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington DC, said China's space programme was a good fit with China's concept of "comprehensive national power". This might be described as a measure of a state's all-round capabilities. 
 
 But he said that China did not see itself as being in a "space race" with anyone else. "I'm comparing it specifically to how the US and the Soviets were behaving in the late 1950s and 1960s when you had space launches almost every month. 
 
 Image caption The rover will be exploring a flat volcanic plain known as Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows) 
 
 "Look at how often the Chinese do manned missions - it's almost every other year." 
 
 Instead, the country is methodically and patiently building up the key elements needed for an advanced space programme - from launchers to manned missions in Earth orbit to unmanned planetary craft - and it is investing heavily. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption China's space mission team celebrate after the landing 
 
 Mr Cheng added: "China is saying: 'We are doing something that only two other countries have done before - the US and the Soviet Union." 
 
 The landing site of Sinus Iridum is a flat volcanic plain, part of a larger feature known as Mare Imbrium that forms the right eye of the "Man in the Moon". ||||| China’s Yutu lunar rover, a gold unmanned space craft also known as the “Jade Rabbit,” has discovered a new kind of moon rock. 
 
 The rock, a basalt from lava that likely flowed about 3 billion years ago, shows different iron oxide and titanium levels from those found by previous Soviet and US missions to the moon four decades ago, according to a Dec. 22 study in Nature Communications led by planetary scientist Zongcheng Ling. Unlike earlier samples from the moon’s surface, which were either high or low in titanium, the newly discovered basalt shows intermediate levels, implying that the moon is made of more diverse stuff than scientists previously thought. 
 
 “Our analysis indicates that this young lunar mare region has unique compositional characteristics, and represents a new type of mare basalt that has not been sampled by previous Apollo and Luna missions and lunar meteorite collections,” wrote Ling and his team. “The CE-3 landing site and in situ analyses of the rocks and soils derived from the fresh crater near the landing site provide key new ground truth for some of the youngest volcanism on the Moon.” 
 
 Bradley Joliff, a scientist at Washington University of St Louis who also worked on the report, told the Guardian he and his team will be able to use the discovery to extrapolate about the moon’s history. 
 
 “The diversity tells us that the Moon’s upper mantle is much less uniform in composition than Earth’s” said Joliff. “And correlating chemistry with age, we can see how the moon’s volcanism changed over time.” 
 
 It’s a nice victory for the Jade Rabbit, which has had a bit of a rocky run since landing on the moon’s surface in December 2013. It has struggled through mechanical troubles and extreme cold, and even been declared dead. Although the rover cannot move, it’s far from dead, continuing to collect data, photographs, and a healthy following on the Chinese microblogging site, Weibo.
– Its mission had a rocky start, but China's Jade Rabbit moon rover is now sending back some nifty high-resolution images of the lunar surface, reports CNN. China has made them available to download here, though Business Insider finds the process "frustratingly complicated." Luckily, it adds, Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has done much of the heavy lifting, so head here if you'd like to see many, many more.