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China landed a probe on the moon on Tuesday, said the Beijing space agency, which aims to bring the first lunar samples back to Earth in four decades.
China has invested billions in its military-led space program, hoping to have a manned space station by 2022 and eventually send humans to the Moon.
The goal of the latest mission is to collect lunar rocks and soil to help scientists learn about the origins, formation, and volcanic activity of the Moon on its surface.
The Chang’e-5 spacecraft, named for the mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, “landed on the near side of the Moon on Tuesday night,” the state media agency Xinhua reported, citing the National Administration of the Moon. China space.
If the return trip is successful, China will be only the third country to have recovered samples from the Moon, after the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.
This mission is the first attempt to bring lunar samples to Earth since the Soviet Union’s Moon 24 did so in 1976.
The Chinese probe entered the orbit of the Moon on Saturday after a 112-hour journey from Earth, Xinhua said, after a rocket carried it into space from the southern Chinese province of Hainan last week.
– ‘Space dream’ –
It involves collecting two kilograms (4.5 pounds) of material in a previously unexplored area known as the Oceanus Procellarum, or “Ocean of Storms,” which consists of a vast plain of lava, according to the scientific journal Nature.
Xinhua reported that the probe was designed to collect samples from the lunar surface, as well as to drill beneath it to secure a diverse variety of samples.
Harvesting will take place over the course of one lunar day, equivalent to around 14 Earth days.
The lunar samples will be returned to Earth in a capsule scheduled to land in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China in late December, according to the US space agency NASA.
The mission is technically challenging and involves several innovations that had not been seen during previous attempts to collect moon rocks, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Jonathan McDowell told AFP last month.
Under President Xi Jinping, plans for China’s “space dream,” as he calls it, have accelerated.
Beijing is finally looking to catch up with the United States and Russia after years of belatedly matching their space milestones.
China’s first satellite soared into space on the back of a Long March rocket in 1970, while human spaceflight took decades more, and Yang Liwei became China’s first astronaut to go into space in 2003.
A Chinese lunar rover landed on the other side of the Moon in January 2019 in a world first that fueled Beijing’s aspirations to become a space superpower.
The latest probe is among a series of ambitious goals set by Beijing, including creating a super-powerful rocket capable of delivering heavier payloads than NASA and private rocket company SpaceX can handle, a lunar base, and a space station with permanent crew.
Astronauts and scientists in China have also spoken of manned missions to Mars.
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