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For a few hours, a space mission from China has been on its way to the Moon to achieve a rather ambitious goal: to take some lunar rocks and bring them back to Earth. Barring unforeseen circumstances, another piece of the Moon could reach our planet by the end of the year, almost half a century after the last collection of lunar rocks made by the former Soviet Union.
Change
The mission is called Chang’e 5, named after the moon goddess in various Chinese mythologies, and is the fifth to be carried out as part of a large lunar exploration project.
China, which in recent decades has improved its lunar space program, had started a first phase of operations between 2007 and 2010 to test the achievement and correct insertion into lunar orbit with the Chang’e 1 and 2 missions. Having obtained these First important results, between 2013 and 2019 it had carried out the Chang’e 3 and 4 missions, with the aim of experimenting controlled moon landings and testing automatic robots (rovers) to explore the ground.
Now, with Chang’e 5, China wants to move to the next level: collecting lunar samples to bring them back to Earth, meanwhile experimenting with techniques and technologies that could be used in the future for missions with humans on our satellite.
Launching
Chang’e 5 departed at 9:30 pm (Italian time) on Monday, November 23 from the Wenchang Space Center on Hainan Island in southern China. The total cargo of the mission is approximately 8.2 tons. Carrying such a mass beyond the Earth’s atmosphere is not easy: a Long March 5 rocket was used for this, the most powerful launcher developed by China to date.
The launch was broadcast by the main television networks and followed with great interest, thanks to the propaganda work carried out by the Chinese government in recent days to promote a new large national company.
4 in 1
On the 5th of the Long March it pushed 4 different space modules beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, which in this first phase will travel together towards the lunar orbit. One of the four elements is a service module, which is responsible for transporting fellow travelers to the destination. Upon entering lunar orbit, two linked robots will separate from the service vehicle to begin their controlled descent to the moon.
Click to enlarge (Wikimedia)
The director is a landerIn other words, a ship designed to land in a world other than ours and perform various types of activities, but without the possibility of moving from the point where it touched the ground. Your task will be to take between 2 and 4 kilograms of lunar rocks and store them in the vehicle with which you reached the moon. This second element is an ascent module: once completed, the load will be released from the lander and it will return to lunar orbit with its precious cargo.
The ascent module will meet with the rest of the team that was left in orbit around the moon. Once connected to the service module, it will transfer its cargo to a capsule, designed to withstand the stresses of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.
The ascent module, the service module and the capsule will begin their journey back to Earth. In the vicinity of our planet, the capsule will separate from its two traveling companions and begin a turbulent re-entry into the atmosphere, taking the lunar rocks with it. If all goes according to plan, he will reach Inner Mongolia, the Chinese autonomous region in the north of the country, where he will be picked up by a recovery team.
Workers at work around Chang’e 5 (CNSA)
Ocean
The lunar landing site chosen by the Chinese Space Agency (CNSA) is located in the Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”), a vast plateau with relatively uniform soil on the visible side of the Moon. Researchers hypothesize that it was formed after some ancient volcanic eruptions, the magma of which covered much of the area. This would explain the presence of less obvious and marked craters than those in other areas of the satellite. The samples collected by Chang’e 5 could be very helpful in better understanding the history of the Moon and the dynamics that led it to appear as we see it today.
(NASA.gov)
23 days
The mission won’t last many days – it should end within the next three weeks, including the return of the capsule with the moon rocks. Time is tight as Chang’e 5 will have to do everything before the sample area is shaded, with a drop in temperature to -130 ° C. lander and the ascent module was not designed to operate at as low temperatures as some previous mission vehicles had been. There was no reason to complicate the design of the Chang’e 5’s components, considering that the entire mission can be accomplished so quickly.
Moon rocks
The first lunar rocks were transported to Earth by American Apollo astronauts in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The former Soviet Union never reached the satellite with its cosmonauts, but developed several robots that were able to recover rocky material from the Moon and then bring it to our planet. The last Soviet sampling carried out in 1976 with the Luna 24 mission was also the last chance to transport lunar rocks to Earth.
A display model of the Soviet Luna 24 (Wikimedia)
In the case of a successful Chang’e 5, China would become the third country in history to bring lunar samples to our planet.
With crews, one day
Looking at the current mission plan, one would think that Chinese technicians and researchers have complicated their lives, envisioning the use of four different components to be sent to the Moon. They could have made an ascent vehicle capable of autonomously returning to Earth, without the need to reunite with other vehicles orbiting the Moon. However, this solution would not have allowed the experimentation of techniques and technologies to be exploited in the future for new missions.
Many aspects of Chang’e 5 recall, to a small extent, how the Apollo missions that led to the first human moon landing in 1969 were organized. Three astronauts landed on the Moon aboard a command module, connected to a service and a lunar module. (LEM), which included an ascent module. One astronaut remained in the command and service module in orbit around the moon, while the other two astronauts reached the lunar floor aboard the LEM. At the end of their stay on the Moon, they used the lower part of the LEM as a mini launch pad, from where the ascent module began to reach the other modules in orbit, with which they returned to Earth. Then the command module was used for reentry to the atmosphere.
On a much smaller scale, Chang’e 5 will do more or less the same, allowing the Chinese Space Agency to collect important data and learn more about the techniques for organizing future missions to the Moon with humans. Although the plans have yet to be fully publicized, the Chinese space program plans to stage manned lunar missions by 2030, some 60 years after the first US moon landing.
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