[ad_1]
A lunar expert says that any rock returned from the moon by China’s Chang’e 5 lunar probe could answer the unexplored ‘puzzle’ of the moon’s history. The probe is on its way to reach the moon by the end of the week.
It is Beijing’s first attempt to recover moon rocks, and the world’s first, since the 1970s.
The main objective of the mission is to drill two meters below the lunar surface and extract about two kilograms of rock and debris, to return it to Earth.
Professor Clive Neal, The lunar geologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana told Euronews that the new mission showed how far China’s technological capacity had come.
“The Chinese lunar program has really made great strides, landing on the other side with Chang’e 4 and now this capsule to return samples to earth for the first time in 44 years since the Soviets did it in 1976, is further proof. of its evolving capabilities and an exciting time for lunar science.
“The Americans returned 382 kilograms of lunar rocks with the six Apollo missions and the volcanism was between 3.1 and 3.8 billion years old.
“These lunar rocks where they are going to land are supposedly younger lava flows than we have any sample and the moon is a small body. Its heat engine should have been extinguished a long time ago and it has not, so it remains a puzzle.
“These are new samples from a new time period in the moon’s history that we shouldn’t have any records of in the sample collection, so these are really new samples.”
Professor Neal said that there were still major obstacles before the mission could be completed, in terms of things that could go wrong:
“There are catastrophic situations, such as landing failures and relaunch failures; there are also failures in the encounter with the orbiter that is going to bring the samples home.
“But China has taken a very tiered approach to robotic exploration and we see the care they have taken in developing their systems with the Chang’e 4 rover still running strong on the other side of the moon.”
[ad_2]
