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Most of the lunar rock and dust samples that are available for scientists to study on Earth date back to the Apollo era, and the last samples returned from the moon in the 1970s. China wants to change that, and this week will launch the Chang’e-5 probe that will collect material from the moon’s surface and return it to Earth for study. The mission will test China’s ability to collect samples remotely in preparation for more complicated missions in the future.
If China can recover material from the moon, it will become the third nation to complete the feat. The United States and the Soviet Union are the only countries that have returned samples of the Moon. While only two countries have recovered samples from the moon, both Japan and India have launched lunar missions.
The first human-made object to land on the moon was a spacecraft called Luna 2 sent by the Soviet Union that crashed into the moon in 1959. It was the first human-made object to reach another celestial body. The Apollo-era missions sent six flights to the moon between 1969 and 1972 and returned 842 pounds of rock and soil from the moon.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union sent three successful robotic sample return missions to the moon, with the last one called Luna 24 bringing in just six ounces of sample. China wants to collect about 4.5 pounds of lunar samples from a previously unvisited area of the moon. China wants to collect samples from a lava plain known as Oceanus Procellarum, which means Ocean of Storms.
All Apollo-era samples came from less than half the lunar surface. Scientists have advocated for new sample return missions to look at different critical areas where questions remain from previous exploration.
