China’s Chang’e 5 lunar capsule not home and dry yet, recovery mission commander says
- Spacecraft is set to land in the Inner Mongolia region on Thursday morning but it still has many challenges to overcome, Bian Hancheng says
- Chinese mission is the first to successfully collect samples from the surface of the moon since 1976
China might have successfully collected the first lunar samples in more than four decades but recovering them once they arrive back on Earth will not be easy, its space authorities say.
“The control [of re-entry] will be extremely difficult,” Bian Hancheng, the commander of the recovery team at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, told state broadcaster CCTV on Wednesday.
Six military helicopters would use heat-seeking devices to try to track the capsule as it fell from the sky above Dorbod banner – close to the region’s border with Mongolia – and once they had a confirmed sighting, a ground team would be alerted and race to the touchdown site, he said.
To put the scale of the search mission into context, the capsule is about the size of a standard dining table, while the banner covers an area similar to that of Belgium.
Bian said there was also a chance the capsule might miss the landing zone altogether because of the high speed at which it was hurtling and the effect on its trajectory as it hit the Earth’s atmosphere.