The Chinese Year of the Horse may be right around the corner, but the Jade Rabbit will be China's focus for months to come.

The country's space program successfully landed and deployed its Jade Rabbit robotic rover on the lunar surface today, marking the first unmanned mission to the moon in over 40 years.

Xinhua, the Chinese government's official news service, reported the Chang'e 3 craft began its descent just after 1300 GMT (9 p.m. Beijing time), and touched down in Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows) 11 minutes later.

After the Chang'e 3 landing module dropped into the moon's atmosphere and fired thrusters to perform the first soft landing there since 1976, the remote-controlled vehicle rolled down a ramp lowered by the Chang'e 3 lander and onto the Sinus Iridum volcanic plain.

The Chang'e-3 mission landed about 12 days after blasting off from a site in the southern area of Xichang, atop a Chinese Long March 3B rocket.

Reports say while the Jade Rabbit will is expected to operate for about three months or so, the lander will continue to work on the moon's surface for about a year.

"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 the University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, told BBC News.

The six-wheeled Chinese Rabbit, which can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel up to 660 feet per hour, carries an array of high-tech instruments, including two panoramic cameras, engineering and navigation cameras, an arm-mounted alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to analyze chemical elements in rocks and soil, an infrared spectrometer to study minerals, and a ground-penetrating radar to map the structure of lunar soil and crust down to several hundred feet.

The lander sports an optical ultraviolet telescope for astronomy, an ultraviolet camera to monitor space weather and a special camera it used to view its descent to the surface.

The rover and lander both are powered by solar panels, although some reports also suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during night hours.

The lander and rover will apparently photograph each other at some point this weekend.

"China's lunar program is an important component of mankind's activities to explore [the] peaceful use of space," Sun Huixian, a space engineer with the Chinese lunar program, told Xinhua.

According to Chinese space scientists, the Chang'e 3 mission is designed to test new technologies, gather new data and build intellectual expertise. It's also the intention of the Chinese government to test for valuable mineral resources that could be mined.

The rover's name, Jade Rabbit, was chosen in an online poll of 3.4 million voters and originates from an ancient Chinese myth about a rabbit living on the moon as the pet of the lunar goddess Chang'e.