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China says its latest lunar probe has finished taking samples of the lunar surface and sealing 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. .
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 rover robot.
The Chang’e 5 landed Tuesday on the Sea of Storms on the near side of the moon, on a mission to bring the moon rocks back to Earth for the first time since 1976.
The probe “has completed sampling on the moon, and the samples have been sealed inside the spacecraft,” China’s National Space Administration said Thursday.
Plans call for the spacecraft’s upper stage, known as its ascendant, to be re-launched into the lunar orbit to transfer the samples into a capsule for return to Earth.
The timing of its return wasn’t 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 to both collect samples from the surface and drill two meters to recover materials that could provide clues to the history of the moon, Earth, other planets and the characteristics 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 Inner Mongolian grasslands. This is where China’s manned Shenzhou spacecraft made its comeback since China first put a man into space in 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.
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