China Moon Mission and an academic sentenced to death

Chinese probe on the way to the Moon

A Chinese spacecraft is on its way to the Moon after taking off off the coast of Hainan Island in southern China at 4.30 a.m. local time on November 24.

Chang’e-5’s mission is to retrieve rocks from the Moon and return them to Earth. If successful, the spacecraft will be the first to collect lunar material in 44 years, and the mission will be the first in China, ushering in the next phase of its increasingly complex lunar exploration program. Several Chang’e spacecraft, named after a Chinese Moon goddess, have reached and landed on the Moon.

The Chang’e-5 took off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center aboard the Chinese Long March-5 rocket. Its 500,000-kilometer round trip to the Moon will take about three weeks.

“This will greatly encourage people, especially the younger generations, to study and explore the worlds beyond our Earth,” says Xiao Long, a planetary geologist at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan.

If the mission achieves its goals, it will usher in a new era of robotic returns of samples from the Moon, which will undoubtedly change scientists’ understanding of the planetary body, says Clive Neal, a geoscientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. . . “Now we wait for the samples to be collected and returned.”

The execution of an Iranian academic sentenced to death looms

A medical researcher sentenced to death in Iran three years ago on a charge of espionage, which he denies, is under threat of imminent execution. Nature it’s been said.

How Nature In the press, Ahmadreza Djalali, a disaster medicine academic with dual Iranian-Swedish nationality, was nearing the end of a week of solitary confinement at Evin Prison in Tehran, where he has been held since 2016. He is expected to be transferred. to Rajai Shahr prison, west of Tehran, where the execution could take place, according to a letter dated November 24 named after Mohammad Barae, a well-known judge in the Iranian judicial system.

Vida Mehrannia, Djalali’s wife, said Nature she had received a phone call from him on November 25 in which he said he was being transferred to solitary confinement and then to another prison to be executed.

“This letter appears to be a court order from a judge declaring that the death sentence will be carried out,” says Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a scholar of the Iranian legal system working at SOAS University in London.

Human rights organizations, researchers and the Swedish Foreign Ministry urge Iranian head of state Ali Khamenei to show clemency.

Spanish scientists celebrate a big budget boost

Scientists in Spain have welcomed a boost to their research budget, which they hope can help reverse the damage caused by a decade of cuts. The Spanish government’s draft budget for 2021 increases science ministry funding by nearly 60% compared to 2020. If approved, the boost would raise the ministry’s budget to 3.2 billion euros ($ 3.8 billion), the greater quantity destined to science in Spain.

“My eyes almost popped out,” says Amaya Moro-Martín, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, who is from Spain and who in 2012 co-led a protest by scientists against the country’s austerity measures.

Much of the increase comes from a European Commission program for member states hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Spain will receive 140,000 million euros from the European Union for six years. By 2021, the government has allocated 1.1 billion euros of EU money to the science ministry and added 2.1 billion euros from its own coffers.

Many researchers hope the cash will help the institutes renovate their facilities and hire more staff.

The budget must now go through Parliament. The Minister of Science, Pedro Duque, said Nature he was sure it would.