Hong Kong
CNN
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China’s lunar lander Chang’e-6 returned to Earth on Tuesday, successfully completing a historic mission to retrieve the first-ever samples from the far side of the moon in a major step forward for the country’s ambitious space program.
The re-entry module “landed safely” in a designated area in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia just after 2pm local time, state broadcaster CCTV said. A live broadcast by CCTV showed the module parachuting down and applause erupting in the mission control room.
“The Chang’e-6 lunar exploration mission was a complete success,” Zhang Kejian, director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said in the mission control room.
Searchers found the module minutes after it landed, according to CCTV, whose live stream showed workers inspecting it on a patch of grass next to a Chinese flag.
The success of the mission marks a major milestone in China’s “eternal dream” of establishing the country as a space power, as expressed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and comes at a time when many countries, including the United States, are also stepping up their own lunar exploration programs.
In a congratulatory speech on Tuesday, Xi hailed the mission as “another milestone achievement in building a great nation in the fields of space and science and technology.”
Beijing plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2030 and set up a research base on the lunar south pole, an area thought to contain water ice and where the United States also wants to set up a base.
The Chang’e-6 probe is expected to bring back up to two kilograms of lunar dust and rocks from the far side of the moon, which will be analysed by Chinese researchers before being made accessible to international scientists, the CNSA said.
Chang’e 6 Lunar Rover/Weibo
The Chang’e-6 probe was photographed earlier this month using its robotic arm to raise the Chinese flag on the far side of the moon.
Experts say the results of the sample analysis could help scientists look back at the evolution of the Moon, Earth and the solar system, while also aiding China’s goal of utilizing the lunar surface’s resources to advance lunar exploration.
The samples were collected using a drill and robotic arm from a site within the vast South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact crater that formed about 4 billion years ago on the far side of the moon, never visible from Earth.
The Ascender then lifted them off the lunar surface and transported them to a re-entry vehicle in lunar orbit, which separated them from the lunar orbiter and returned them to Earth.
The progress of Chang’e-6, China’s most technically complex mission to date, has attracted keen interest domestically since its launch on May 3.
Earlier this month, images of a lunar lander apparently flying the Chinese flag and carving the character “Zhong” (an abbreviation for China) into the moon’s surface went viral on Chinese social media.
Ahead of the lunar lander’s return on Tuesday, what appeared to be debris from another Chinese rocket fell to the ground in southwestern China on Saturday, leaving a trail of bright yellow smoke and sending villagers fleeing, according to video posted to Chinese social media and sent to CNN by a local witness.
The far side of the moon has been a fascination for scientists ever since they first saw it in grainy black-and-white images taken by the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft in 1959 and realized how different it was from the side facing Earth.
The lunar mares — large, dark plains of cooled lava that dot much of the moon’s near side — were absent, and instead the far side appeared to be covered in impact scars, craters of different sizes and ages.
Nearly five years and decades after the Chang’e-4 mission achieved China’s first and only soft landing on the far side of the moon, scientists in China and around the world are excited about what samples can reveal.
“This is a gold mine … a treasure chest,” said James Head, a professor of planetary geosciences at Brown University, who worked with European scientists and Chinese scientists analyzing samples brought back from Saturn’s near side by the Chang’e 5 mission. “Scientists around the world are very excited about this mission,” Head said.
Head noted that Earth’s plate tectonic shifts and erosion have destroyed many clues to its evolutionary history, obscuring the first billion years of Earth’s history, including when life first emerged.
“The Moon, with its lack of plate tectonics on its surface, is a frozen record of the early solar system and is fundamental to our understanding of it,” he said, adding that understanding the composition of the Moon will help explore the solar system’s past as well as its future.
While these broader scientific questions are the stated focus of the Chang’e-6 mission, experts say analysis of the samples’ composition and physical properties could also help advance efforts to learn how to harness lunar resources for future lunar and space exploration.
“While the (Chang’e-6) mission is focused on answering specific scientific questions, the lunar soil collected by this mission may be useful for future resource utilization,” said Qian Yuqi, a planetary geologist at the University of Hong Kong.
Lunar soil could be used for 3D printing to produce bricks for building research bases on the moon, while some scientists are already working to find more economical and practical techniques to extract gases such as helium-3, oxygen and hydrogen from the soil that could support further lunar exploration, he said.
Chinese scientists who receive the samples will share data and conduct collaborative research with international partners, after which Beijing will make the samples available for international teams to access, CNSA officials said in a statement.
International teams had to wait nearly three years to apply for access to samples from the Chang’e-5 mission, but some of the earliest published research on those samples came from teams of Chinese and international scientists.
02:42 – Source: CNN
US and China make strides in space exploration
Chang’e 6 is the sixth of eight planned missions in the Chang’e series and is widely seen as a significant step towards China’s goal of sending astronauts to the moon within the next few years.
“Each step in the sample return mission process is exactly what is needed to land humans on the Moon and return,” Head said. “On the one hand, this is a science mission, but everyone needs to remember that the command and control aspects are exactly what is needed for things like human lunar exploration and Mars sample return.”
China’s ambitions to send astronauts to the moon come as the United States aims to launch a crewed Artemis mission as early as 2026, its first such attempt in more than 50 years.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has cited China’s pace as driving U.S. progress, telling lawmakers in April that the two countries are “effectively in a race.”
“My concern is that they’ll get to the Antarctic first and say, ‘This is our territory, stay off,’ because the south pole of the moon is an important part. We think there’s water there, and if there’s water there’s rocket fuel,” Nelson said.
China has sought to allay concerns about its ambitions by repeatedly saying space exploration should “benefit all mankind” and actively seeking partners for a planned international lunar research station.
China and the United States are not the only two with their sights on the national prestige, potential scientific benefits, access to resources, and further deep space exploration that a successful lunar mission could bring.
Last year, India landed its first spacecraft on the moon, while Russia’s first lunar mission in decades ended in failure when the Luna 25 probe crashed into the lunar surface.
In January, Japan became the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, but its Moon Sniper lander ran into power problems after landing at the wrong angle. The following month, IM-1, a mission designed by the private Texas-based company Intuitive Machines and funded by NASA, landed near the moon’s south pole.
China’s space agency said earlier this year that it plans to launch the Chang’e-7 mission to the lunar south polar region in 2026, and Chang’e-8 in 2028 to conduct tests aimed at utilizing lunar resources in preparation for a lunar research station.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
