No, I don’t, which makes it even more interesting. I know though that ItaloDisco is now Nazi music, via the same Western media from the last few days.

I didn't see the BBC one on the front page at all, and it's currently well below the fold of the Science & Health section, despite being two days more recent than "plant with biggest genome found" (most of the rest is health science and generic "health content" like TV shows). There's even an article about SAR radar satellites above it, so it's not even the top space story today.

It's certainly false to say that it's not in the mainstream media, but I think it's also fair to say it's not exactly top of the bill.

For comparison, Chandrayaan-3 was below only Prigozhin's death last August (https://web.archive.org/web/20230823204015/https://www.bbc.c...) and the Chandrayaan programme has its own subcategory. To be fair that was the first Indian landing of any kind, so yes, a bit different.

Not sure Chandrayaan-3 made CCTV top bill either, though! (It was reported, under the Chinese translated name 月船3号, just I don't know how high up it was on the day).

It is the first ever far-side sample-return mission ever (and I think only the second far-side landing at all, the first being Chang'e 4 in 2019), so there's certainly some non-trivial element of "doing something no one has done before".

And the far side is somewhat geologically (selenologically?) different to make that a useful scientific thing rather than solely for bragging rights, not that those aren't in the calculus with these things.

Chang'e 7 will be pretty interesting as it's going to Shackleton crater, which is a hypothetised water source (though evidence of surface ice is pretty weak) and has never been explored other than orbitally and an impactor from Chandrayaan-1.

Yes, but look at how few comments there are on those articles, suggesting the story got very little engagement. This is generally a sign of low initial placement. Unfortunately since we've handed a lot of editorial decisions over to algorithmic curation, relevant stories (eg to a 'science' section) often fail to get the attention they deserve at the time of publication.