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Chinese officials said the Chang’e 5 mission finished drilling and collecting samples from a lunar lava plain on Wednesday at last, hours before the spacecraft’s robotic elevator was due to take off from the moon to begin the return journey to the moon. Land.
The milestone marked the start of the mission’s return journey, which includes an ambitious series of automated maneuvers to take off from the lunar surface on Thursday and encounter an orbiter circling the moon. Chang’e 5 will attempt the first-ever docking between two robotic spacecraft in lunar orbit, then transfer the lunar rock container to the returning spaceship.
If all goes according to plan, the Chang’e 5 sample container is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and parachute towards a landing in the Inner Mongolia region around December 16.
According to the China National Space Administration, Chang’e 5 completed its sample collection work on the moon around 9:00 am EST (1400 GMT) on Wednesday.
The lander landed Tuesday at 10:11 am EST (1511 GMT) in the moon’s Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, a region in the northern hemisphere of the near side of the moon, east of a volcanic plateau called Mons Rümker.
CNSA said the lander deployed solar panels and a communications antenna after landing, then activated a panoramic camera, an instrument to analyze the structure of the lunar soil, and a mineral spectrum analyzer to examine the alien landscape that surrounds the spacecraft.
Chinese officials said the Chang’e 5 mission finished drilling and collecting samples from a lunar lava plain on Wednesday at last, hours before the spacecraft’s robotic elevator was due to take off from the moon to begin the return journey to the moon. Land.
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The data from the scientific instruments will provide a reference for scientists as they study the samples reported by Chang’e 5, the CNSA said in a statement.
The Chang’e 5 probe completed phase one of its sample collection operations on Tuesday at 3:53 PM EST (2053 GMT), when officials said the lander finished drilling underground rock samples and sealed the material within a return vector.
The next step in the mission’s two-day lunar stay involved using a shovel on the end of a robotic arm to collect material from the lunar surface. The CNSA said the 19-hour sampling activity ended at the end of Wednesday, Beijing time.
The spacecraft packed and sealed the lunar material in a storage device carried by the Chang’e 5 elevator, which is due to take off from the moon on Thursday, using the mission’s descent phase as a launch pad.
CNSA also released a high-resolution panoramic image captured by a camera aboard Chang’e 5. The image shows one of the lander’s legs embedded in the loose soil on the moon, a handful of rocks on the surface, and a distant cluster. of hills on the lunar horizon.
The goal of the Chang’e 5 mission was to collect more than 4 pounds, or 2 kilograms, of rocks for the return to Earth. Chinese officials have not released an estimate of how much material the spacecraft has collected on the moon.
If successful, Chang’e 5 will become the first mission to recover material from the moon and return it to Earth from the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976.
Chang’e 5 launched on November 23 and entered orbit around the moon on November 28 before the lander detached from the mission orbiter and return module to begin descent maneuvers.
The successful landing of Chang’e 5 on Tuesday marked the third time that China has made a soft landing of a spacecraft on the moon, following the Chang’e 3 mission in 2013 and Chang’e 4 in 2019. Chang ‘ and 4 became the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the far side of the moon, a feat made possible by the positioning of a purpose-built Chinese data transmission satellite in deep space.
Chang’e 3 and Chang’e 4 carried rovers as mobile explorers exploring the lunar landscape. The Chang’e 5 mission to the lunar surface does not have a mobile rover, and the craft is designed to complete its work in two days in the sunlight, rather than surviving the super cold two-week lunar night.
Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame, said China has shown that it can land on the moon with previous missions.
“But then they have to collect the sample,” Neal said in an interview shortly after the launch of Chang’e 5. “The interesting thing is that they launch themselves from the moon, enter the lunar orbit, and then meet with the vehicle. return from Earth that will bring that champion back to Earth safely and without compromise. When the Soviets did so in 1976, the last time, he was headed to Earth. They launched themselves from the moon and returned directly to Earth. This has an extra step, which must be fine for the champion to actually come back.
“But given the ability they have shown to do things for the first time, like landing and wandering on the other side, I expect things to be successful, and I hope they are,” Neal said in an interview with Spaceflight Now.
“We have never done a whole process of taking and sealing samples,” said Peng Jing, deputy chief designer of the Chang’e 5 mission at the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, in an interview broadcast by China’s state-owned CCTV. . “This part of the job depends mainly on several complicated structures including the drill … robotic arms used to collect rocks and regolith on the lunar surface, and actually a high vacuum sealing device designed to ensure that the sample can remain intact. .. “
Scientists want to make sure the lunar specimens are sealed for return to Earth to avoid contamination.
Another challenge will be the launch of Chang’e 5 from the lunar surface, the first takeoff from the moon since the 1970s. The ascent module must launch on a precise trajectory to meet the return module in lunar orbit, and the ground crews did not know the exact orientation of the lander on the lunar surface until after landing.
“We need to accurately anticipate the position and speed of the two spacecraft flying (into) the lunar orbit,” Peng told CCTV. “Because the probes don’t match in size, our ascender only weighs 300 to 400 kilograms (660 to 880 lbs) when docked, while the (orbiter) weighs nearly 2,000 kilograms (4,400 lbs). Any mistake could to drop the smaller spacecraft and that would make docking work much more difficult than before. “
After transferring the samples to Earth’s return spacecraft, Chang’e 5 will fire the engines to exit the lunar orbit and head home.
The return vector will re-enter the atmosphere at around 25,000 mph, or 40,000 kilometers per hour, significantly faster than reentry from low Earth orbit.
Nine missions returned lunar samples to Earth, including NASA’s six Apollo missions with astronauts and three Luna robotic spacecraft launched from the Soviet Union. NASA’s Apollo missions reported 842 pounds (382 kilograms) of rocks from the moon.
There is evidence that the rocks in the Chang’e 5 landing zone are much younger than those returned by the Apollo astronauts. These specimens are about 3.5 billion years old, created during a period of active volcanism in the first billion years of the moon’s existence.
The lava plains east of Mons Rümker appear to be less affected by asteroid impacts, suggesting that the rocks may be less than 2 billion years old. But models of the moon’s evolution suggest that its internal warming should have decreased by that time, making the volcanoes extinct, Neal said.
“It will be exciting to watch the age of these returning champions and their actual compositions as well,” said Neal.
“We haven’t returned samples from the Moon in 44 years, from Luna 24, a long time ago,” James Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University, said in an interview broadcast by the Chinese television network CGTN. “The best way to get to know the moon is to return the samples. This is true for any planetary body because we can do laboratory analyzes that are far superior to what we can do remotely or in situ. “
“Chinese scientists said samples of different ages are needed to form a complete picture of the moon,” Peng said. “Through analysis, they think the samples we will collect from the northwestern Oceanus Procellarum region are relatively young. By combining these samples with the previous ones, we will have a better understanding of the formation and evolution of the moon. “
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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