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BEIJING (AP) – China said on Thursday that its latest lunar probe had finished taking samples from the moon’s surface and sealing them in the spacecraft for return to Earth, the first time such a mission had been attempted by a country for more than 40 years.
The Chang’e 5, the third Chinese probe to land on the moon, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for the Beijing space program, which also has a probe en route to Mars carrying a robot rover.
The Chang’e 5 landed on the Sea of Storms on the near side of the moon on Tuesday as part of a mission to bring moon rocks back to Earth for the first time since 1976.
This panoramic camera image on board the Chang’e-5 spacecraft lander-ascender combination provided by the Chinese National Space Administration shows a surface of the moon after it landed on the moon on Wednesday, December 2, 2020. The Chinese government says the spacecraft landed on the moon on Tuesday to bring moon rocks back to Earth for the first time since the 1970s. (Chinese National Space Administration / Xinhua via AP)
The probe “has completed sampling on the moon, and the samples have been sealed in the spacecraft,” China’s National Space Administration said in a statement.
Plans call for the top stage of the probe known as the ascender to be re-launched into lunar orbit to transfer the samples to a capsule for return to Earth. The timing of its return was not immediately clear, and the lander can last up to a moonlit day, or 14 Earth days, before falling temperatures render it unusable.
Chang’e is equipped to take samples from the surface and drill 2 meters (over 6 feet) to recover material that could provide clues to the history of the moon, Earth, other planets and features from space.
While collecting samples is its primary task, the lander is also equipped to take deep photographs of the area surrounding its landing site, map conditions below the surface with ground-penetrating radar, and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and water content.
The Chang’e 5 return module is expected to land around mid-December on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, where the Chinese crewed spacecraft Shenzhou has made its return since China put a man into space for the first time in 2003, becoming the third country only. after Russia and the United States.
Chang’e 5 has revived discussions about one day sending China for a crewed mission to the Moon and possibly building a science base, although no timeline has been proposed for this. such projects.
China also launched its first temporary orbiting laboratory in 2011 and a second in 2016. Plans call for a permanent space station after 2022, possibly serviced by a reusable space plane.
As China steps up cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely constrained by concerns about the secretive nature and close military ties of the Chinese program.
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