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China’s Chang’e 5 moon lander and ascent vehicle separate from the orbiter/return vehicle early on Monday ahead of a landing in the moon’s Ocean of Storms for a lunar sample mission. Photo: CCTV
ChinaScience

China’s moon mission makes a lunar touchdown, ready for Chang’e 5 to collect rocks and soil

  • Lander and ascender vehicle arrive to drill into the surface for samples
  • Orbiter will continue circling the moon, waiting for the lander to finish sampling
Space
William Zheng
William Zheng
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China achieved a major milestone in its ambitious mission to bring home moon rocks with a successful soft lunar landing on Tuesday.

The Chang’e 5 spacecraft’s moon lander and ascender vehicle landed near the peak of Mons Rümker, a mountain in the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms) region of the moon, after 11pm Beijing time on Tuesday, according to state news agency Xinhua.

“Just now, the Chang’e 5 landing craft successfully landed in the preselected landing zone,” Xinhua reported.

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China's Chang'e 5 moon mission makes a lunar touchdown, ready to collect rocks and soil

China's Chang'e 5 moon mission makes a lunar touchdown, ready to collect rocks and soil
Earlier, CNSA said the landing location had been chosen because the geological age of the landing area was about 3.7 billion years, which could help scientists gain a more comprehensive understanding of the formation and evolution of the moon.

The latitude of the sampling point was also based on considerations such as solar light intensity and temperature. The location will help reduce fuel consumption for the ascender to bring the sample back to the orbit.

The lander is expected to drill as deep as 2m (6.6 feet) for rock cores and use a robotic arm to collect 2kg (4.4 pounds) of surface samples in its protective capsules over two weeks.

In the meantime, the orbiter will keep circling the moon, waiting for the lander to finish sampling before ascending to the orbit and redocking. Then the mission will launch from the lunar orbit and return to Earth. It is expected to land in China’s northern region of Inner Mongolia in mid-December.

China’s plan for moon research station gets closer with Chang’e 5 success

The returner will be released from the Chang’e 5 orbiter at an altitude of about 5,000km (3,100 miles). In a process called “skip re-entry”, it has to enter the atmosphere to decelerate and jump out of the atmosphere again and enter the atmosphere a second time to slow enough to land safely.

The Chang’e 5 mission is China’s first attempt at a sample-return mission. If successful, it will become the first mission to bring lunar samples back to Earth since the landing of the Russian spacecraft, Luna 24, on August 18, 1976. The United States’ Apollo programme brought 382kg of lunar rocks and soil back to Earth, and the former Soviet Union retrieved a little over 300g of lunar samples from three missions.

It will set a significant milestone for China’s moon programme.

Before this mission China landed three active spacecraft on the lunar surface, including Chang’e 3 which arrived in 2013, the Chang’e 4 lander and the Yutu 2 rover which landed on the far side of the moon in January 2019. All are part of China’s ambitious Chang’e lunar exploration programme aiming to land Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030.
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