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(CNN) – China successfully launched an unmanned spacecraft to the moon on Tuesday to collect and report samples of lunar soil and rocks, according to Chinese state media Xinhua.
Chang’e 5 took off from the Wenchang spacecraft launch site off the coast of the southern province of Hainan Island at 4:30 am local time.
This is the world’s first sample-collection mission since the United States and the Soviet Union launched similar probes more than 40 years ago, Xinhua reports.
The total flight time of the Chang’e 5 is expected to be 20 days, and 2 kilograms of lunar samples should be collected during its mission.
The rocket has three compartments, an orbiter, a lander, an elevator and a return, with a total take-off mass of 8.2 tons. When the orbiter enters the orbit of the Moon, the ascendant “will land in the northwestern region of Oceanus Procellarum, also known as the Ocean of Storms, on the near side of the moon in early December,” Xinhua says.
“In 48 hours, a robotic arm will be extended to collect rocks and settle on the lunar surface and a drill will drill into the ground.”
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Since the Soviet Union made a forced landing of Luna 2 on the moon in 1959, the first man-made object to reach another celestial body, a handful of other countries, including Japan and India, have launched lunar missions.
In the Apollo program, which first took humans to the moon, the United States sent 12 astronauts on six flights from 1969 to 1972, bringing back 382 kg of rocks and soil.
The Soviet Union deployed three successful robotic sample return missions in the 1970s. The latest, Luna 24, recovered 170.1 grams of samples in 1976 from Mare Crisium, or “Sea of Crisis”.
The Chinese mission wants to bring samples from an unvisited area of the moon
The Chinese probe, scheduled for launch in the next few days, will attempt to collect 2 kg of samples in a previously unvisited area in a massive lava plain known as Oceanus Procellarum, or “Ocean of Storms”.
“The Apollo-Moon sampling zone of the Moon, while critical to our understanding, was carried out in an area that encompasses far less than half the lunar surface,” said James Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University. .
Subsequent data from orbital remote sensing missions showed a wider diversity of rock types, mineralogies, and ages than was represented in the Apollo-Moon sample collections, he added.
“Lunar scientists have supported robotic sample return missions to these different critical areas in order to address a number of fundamental questions left by the previous exploration,” Head said.
The Chang’e-5 mission can help answer questions like how long the moon has been volcanically active inside it and when its magnetic field has dissipated – the key to protecting any life form from solar radiation.
(Jin Liwang / Xinhua News via AP)
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