Moon probe prepares to return rock samples to Earth

China said Thursday that its latest lunar probe has finished taking samples of the lunar surface and sealed them inside the spacecraft for return to Earth, the first time such a mission has been attempted by a country in more than 40 years.

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 rover robot.

The Chang’e 5 landed on Tuesday on the Sea of ​​Storms on the near side of the moon, on a mission to return the moon rocks to Earth for the first time since 1976.

The spacecraft “has completed sampling on the moon, and the samples have been sealed inside the spacecraft,” the Chinese National Space Administration said in a statement.

Plans call for the probe’s upper stage known as ascending to be launched back into the lunar orbit to transfer the samples into a capsule for return to Earth. The timing of its return was not immediately clear, and the lander can last up to one lunar day, or 14 Earth days, before plummeting temperatures rendered it unusable.

Chang’e is equipped both to collect samples from the surface and to drill 2 meters (more than 6 feet) to recover materials that could provide clues to the history of the moon, other planets on Earth and features of space.

While sample recovery is its primary task, the lander is also equipped to extensively photograph the area surrounding its landing site, map sub-surface conditions with ground-penetrating radar, and analyze the lunar soil for minerals and the water content.

The Chang’e 5 return module is expected to land around mid-December on the prairies of Inner Mongolia, where the Chinese manned Shenzhou spacecraft made its return since China first put a man into space in the 2003, becoming only the third country to do so. after Russia and the United States.

Chang’e 5 has revived talks about China that it will one day send a manned mission to the moon and possibly build a science base there, although no timeline has been proposed for 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 to be assisted by a reusable space plane.

While China is stepping up cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely limited by concerns over the covert nature and close military ties of the Chinese program.

While China is stepping up cooperation with the European Space Agency and others, interactions with NASA are severely limited by concerns over the covert nature and close military ties of the Chinese program.

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