China’s Chang’e-6 lunar mission returns to Earth with historic samples of the far side

Hong Kong
CNN
—

China’s Chang’e-6 lunar module returned to Earth on Tuesday, successfully completing its historic mission to collect the first-ever samples from the far side of the moon, a major step forward for the country’s ambitious space program.

The reentry module “landed successfully” in a designated zone in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region just after 2 p.m. local time, according to state broadcaster CCTV. A live CCTV feed showed the module landing on a parachute to applause in the mission control room.

“The Chang’e-6 lunar exploration mission was a complete success,” Zhang Kejian, head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said from the control room.

According to CCTV, a search team found the pod minutes after it landed. A live feed showed a worker carrying out inspections of the module, which was lying on a pasture next to a Chinese flag.

The successful mission is a key milestone in China’s “eternal dream” – as Chinese leader Xi Jinping has put it – to establish the country as a dominant space power, and comes as a number of countries, including the United States, are also developing their own lunar exploration programs.

In a congratulatory message on Tuesday, Xi hailed the mission as “another landmark achievement in building a strong country in space, science and technology”.

Beijing plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2030 and build a research base at the moon’s south pole – an area believed to contain water ice where the US also hopes to establish a base.

The Chang’e-6 probe is expected to return to Earth with up to 2 kilograms of lunar dust and rocks from the far side of the moon, which will be analyzed by researchers in China before being made available to international scientists. CNSA.

The results of the analysis of the samples could help scientists look back into the evolution of the moon, Earth and solar system – while helping China’s goal to tap the moon’s resources to further explore it, experts say.

The samples were collected using a drill and a robotic arm from a site in the vast South Pole-Aitken Basin, an impact crater formed about 4 billion years ago on the far side of the Moon that is never visible to Earth.

Ascender then picked them up from the lunar surface and transferred them in lunar orbit to a reentry vehicle, which then traveled back to Earth after separating from its lunar orbit.

The progress of Chang’e-6 – China’s most technically complex mission to date – has been watched with great interest in the country since its launch on May 3.

Earlier this month, images of a lunar lander carrying a Chinese flag and seemingly drilling the character “zhong” — short for China — into the lunar surface circulated on Chinese social media.

The lunar module’s return on Tuesday also comes after suspected debris from a separate Chinese rocket was seen crashing to the ground in southwest China on Saturday, leaving a trail of bright yellow smoke and villagers fleeing, according to videos on Chinese social media. for CNN by a local witness.

The far side of the Moon has been a point of fascination for scientists since they first looked at it in grainy, black-and-white images captured by the Soviet Luna 3 probe in 1959 — and realized how different it is from the side facing Earth.

There were lunar maria, or large, dark plains of cooled lava that mark much of the near side of the Moon. Instead, the flip side appeared to show a record of the impact – covered in craters of various sizes and ages.

Decades later, and about five years since the Chang’e-4 mission made China the first and only country to complete a soft landing on the far side, scientists in China and around the world are pinning high hopes on the information that can be gain. from samples.

“It’s a gold mine … a treasure chest,” said James Head, a professor of planetary geosciences at Brown University who, along with European scientists, worked with Chinese scientists to analyze samples from the Chang’e-5 mission that returned samples from the near side. . “International scientists are absolutely thrilled with the mission,” he said.

Head pointed to the destruction of many clues to evolutionary history due to shifting plate tectonics and erosion that obscured the planet’s first few billion years, including the time when life appeared.

“The Moon is really a keystone for understanding this because its surface doesn’t have plate tectonics — it’s actually a frozen record of what it looked like in our early solar system,” he said, adding that understanding the Moon’s appearance can not only help our understanding of the past, but and future exploration of the solar system.

While the Chang’e-6 mission’s stated focus is on these broader scientific questions, experts say analysis of the samples’ composition and physical properties could also help advance efforts to learn how to exploit lunar resources for future lunar and space exploration. .

“The (Chang’e-6) mission is aimed at answering specific scientific questions, but the lunar soils obtained from the mission can support future resource utilization,” said Yuqi Qian, a planetary geologist at the University of Hong Kong.

Lunar soil could be used for 3D printing to make bricks to build research bases on the moon, while some scientists are already working to find more economical and practical technologies for extracting gases such as helium-3, oxygen and hydrogen from the soil that could support further exploration of the moon, he said.

After receiving the samples, Chinese scientists are expected to share data and conduct joint research with international partners before Beijing later opens the samples for international teams to access, according to a statement from CNSA officials.

International teams had to wait about three years to request access to samples from the Chang’e-5 mission, but some of the first published research on these samples was from teams of Chinese and international scientists.

Chang’e-6 – the sixth of eight planned missions in the Chang’e series – is widely seen as an important step forward for China’s goal of sending astronauts to the moon in the coming years.

“Every step in the sample return mission process is exactly what you need to do to land on the moon and come back,” Head said. “It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that while this is a science mission on the one hand, the command and control aspects (are) exactly what you need for human exploration of the Moon, as well as things like Mars sample return.”

China’s ambitions to send astronauts to the moon come as the US aims to launch a manned ‘Artemis’ mission as early as 2026 – which would be America’s first such attempt in more than 50 years.

NASA chief Bill Nelson appeared to point to China’s pace as a driver of U.S. progress when he told lawmakers in April that the two countries were “actually … in a race.”

“I’m interested in them first (getting to the south pole) and then saying, ‘this is our area, stay out,’ because the south pole of the moon is an important part… We think there’s water there, and if there’s water there, then there’s rocket fuel,” Nelson said.

China has sought to allay concerns about its ambitions, reiterating its position that space exploration should “benefit all mankind” and is actively recruiting partner countries for its planned international lunar research station.

China and the US are not alone in pursuing the national prestige, potential scientific benefits, access to resources and further deep space exploration that successful lunar missions could bring.

Last year, India landed its first spacecraft on the moon, while Russia’s first lunar mission in decades ended in failure when its Luna 25 probe crashed into the moon’s surface.

In January, Japan became the fifth country to land a spacecraft on the moon, although its Moon Sniper lander faced power problems due to an incorrect landing angle. The following month, IM-1, a NASA-funded mission designed by Texas-based private firm Intuitive Machines, landed near the moon’s south pole.

China is scheduled to launch its Chang’e-7 mission to the moon’s south pole region in 2026, while Chang’e-8 will be launched in 2028 to conduct tests aimed at exploiting lunar resources in preparation for a lunar research station, they reported the Chinese space authorities earlier this year.

This story has been updated with further developments.