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- Jonathan Amos
- BBC Science Correspondent
Image source, Reuters
The Chang’e-5 probe took off on Tuesday in a Long March 5 rocket at 4:30 a.m. local time.
China launched a mission on Tuesday to collect rock samples from the Moon.
The Chang’e-5 probe took off in a Long March 5 rocket at 4:30 a.m. local time from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan.
The probe is expected to return to Earth in mid-December.
More than 40 years have passed since missions by the United States and the then Soviet Union collected rocks and lunar soil to be analyzed on our planet.
China hopes to become the third nation to achieve this feat, which requires an extremely complex operation.
The mission includes many different steps that involve an orbiter, a lander and climb, and finally a return component.
He will use a capsule that must survive the high temperatures generated during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
China has successfully carried out previous lunar missions. The Chang’e-4 mission, with a lander and a vehicle, carried out in January 2019 the first moon landing in history on the dark side of the moon.
Image source, NASA JPL
The Chang’e-5 probe will land on a site on the near side of the Moon that was not visited by the Apollo missions.
Keys to the history of the Solar System
Chang’e-5 will land on Mons Rümker, a volcanic plain in a region on the near side of the Moon known as Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms).
It is believed that the rocks in this place they are much more recent than the samples collected by astronauts from the US and Soviet missions.
The rocks at Mons Rümker could be 1.3 billion years old.
Those collected at other sites by previous missions are instead between 3 billion and 4 billion years old.
Image source, CNSA
Artistic illustration of the Chang’e-5 probe. The Chinese Chang’e missions are named after a deity that lives on the Moon according to Chinese mythological tradition.
The new samples will allow scientists to fine-tune methods for determining when different events occurred in the history of the Solar System.
In simple terms, the researchers count craters. The older a surface, the more craters it has, and the more recent the surface, the smaller the number of craters.
“The Moon is the chronometer of the Solar System“explained Neil Bowles, a researcher in planetary sciences at the University of Oxford in England.
“The samples from the NASA Apollo and Moon missions of the former Soviet Union come from known sites and their age was precisely determined by radiometry.”
“We have been able to connect that information to the rate of crater formation and extrapolate it to determine the age of other surfaces in the Solar System,” Bowles added.
Chang’e-5 samples could also help understand the volcanic history of the Moonsaid Katie Joy, a researcher at the University of Manchester.
“The mission is targeting an area where we know there were volcanoes erupting in the past. We want to know precisely when those eruptions occurred.”
“This will allow us to study the history of magma and temperatures on the Moon over time. And we can begin to answer some questions, such as why the Moon ran out of energy to produce volcanoes before other bodies in the Solar System.”
Image source, fake images
Pei Zhaoyu, vice director of the Lunar Exploration Program of the China Space Agency, spoke to the press ahead of the launch.
Complex operation
When Chang’e-5 reaches the Moon it will begin to orbit it. A lander will then separate from the probe to make a descent.
Once this module lands on the lunar surface, different instruments will analyze the environment before collecting the samples.
The lander also has the ability to drill into lunar soil.
An ascent vehicle will then transport the samples until it meets the orbiter.
And it is then that a complex transfer must occur, in which the samples must be placed in a capsule that will transport them to Earth.
Another probe will accompany the capsule to guide it in its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere over the Inner Mongolia region, in northern China.
Image source, CNSA
The Chang’e-4 mission made the first moon landing in history on the far side of the Moon in January 2019.
Each phase of the mission is difficult, but its structure will be familiar to us, as it is similar to that of the manned missions to the Moon of the 1960s and 70s.
China also hopes to launch manned missions in the future.
“We can certainly see the analogy between the Chang’e-5 mission, in terms of the different elements and the interaction between them, with what a human mission would require“said James Carpenter, coordinator for robotic and human exploration at the European Space Agency.
“We are seeing a great expansion in lunar activity.”
“We have the Artemis program, led by the United States, which hopes to send astronauts to the moon, we have China with its very ambitious exploration program, and there are also many other new players.”
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