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A capsule from the Chinese lunar spacecraft has returned to Earth with the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the Moon in more than 40 years.
The newly collected rocks are believed to be billions of years younger than previously obtained by the US and the former Soviet Union, offering new insights into the history of the moon and other bodies in the solar system.
They come from a part of the moon known as Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, near a site called Mons Rumker that was believed to be volcanic in ancient times.
As with the 382 kg of lunar samples brought in by American astronauts from 1969 to 1972, they will be analyzed by age and composition and expected to be shared with other countries.
The capsule of the Chinese lunar spacecraft docked in Inner Mongolia. Image: CSNA
The age of the samples will help fill a gap in knowledge about the moon’s history between roughly 1 billion and 3 billion years ago.
The Chang’e 5 probe capsule landed in the Siziwang district of the Inner Mongolia region on Wednesday.
It had previously detached from its orbiter module and bounced off Earth’s atmosphere to reduce its speed before passing by and parachuting.
Two of the four modules of the Chang’e 5 landed on the moon on December 1 and collected about 2 kg of samples by pulling them from the surface and drilling two meters into the lunar crust.
The samples were deposited in a sealed container which was carried back to the return module in a lift vehicle.
The successful mission was the latest advancement for China’s increasingly ambitious space program, which includes a robotic mission to Mars and plans for a permanent orbiting space station.
The Long March-5 Y5 rocket, carrying the Chang’e-5 lunar probe, lifted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in November.
Recovery teams had prepared helicopters and all-terrain vehicles to locate the signals emitted by the lunar spacecraft and locate it in the darkness that envelops the vast snow-covered region in the extreme north of China, long used as a landing site for the China’s Shenzhou manned spacecraft.
The return of the spacecraft marked the first time that scientists obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks from the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 robot probe in 1976.
