Chinese spacecraft carrying rocks and soil from the moon returns safely
An unmanned Chinese spacecraft carrying rocks and soil from the moon returned safely to Earth early on Thursday (local time) in the first mission in four decades to collect lunar samples, the Xinhua news agency said.
The capsule carrying the samples collected by the Chang’e-5 space probelanded in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region, Xinhua said, quoting the China National Space Administration (CNSA).The director of CNSA, Zhang Kejian, declared the mission a success, Xinhua added.
With this mission, China has become only the third country to have retrieved samples from the moon, following the US and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.
Beijing is looking to catch up with Washington and Moscow after taking decades to match its rivals’ achievements and has poured billions into its military-run space programme.
The spacecraft, named after a mythical Chinese moon goddess, landed on the moon on 1 December and began its return voyage two days later. While on the moon it raised the Chinese flag.
When the probe left the moon two days later, that marked the first time that China had achieved take-off from an extraterrestrial body, CNSA said.
The module then went through the delicate operation of linking up in lunar orbit with the part of the spacecraft that brought the samples back to Earth.
Scientists hope the samples will help them learn about the moon’s origins, formation and volcanic activity on its surface.
The spacecraft’s mission was to collect 2 kgs (4.5 lbs) of material in an area known as Oceanus Procellarum, or “Ocean of Storms”, a vast, previously unexplored lava plain, according to the science journal Nature.
The capsule will be airlifted to Beijing for opening, and the moon samples will be delivered to a research team for analysis and study, the space agency said.
China will make some of the samples available to scientists in other countries, Pei Zhaoyu, deputy director of the CNSA’s Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center, has said.
Xinhua described the mission as one of the most challenging and complicated in China’s aerospace history. The probe comprised separate craft to get to the moon, land on it and collect the samples, get back up and then return the rocks and soil to Earth.
The return capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of about 120km (75 miles). When it was about 10km above land, a parachute
opened and it landed smoothly, after which a search team recovered it, the news agency said.
This was the first such attempt since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976.
Under President Xi Jinping, plans for China’s “space dream”, as he calls it, have been put into overdrive. China hopes to have a crewed space station by 2022 and eventually send humans to the moon.