Chang e 5 returns home with lunar samples

China's most sophisticated and challenging space adventure – the Chang'e 5 robotic lunar mission – ended successfully early Thursday morning with its load of rocks and dust from the moon landing on the grasslands in northern China. The China National Space Administration said in a statement that Chang'e 5's reentry capsule touched down on its preset landing site in Siziwang banner of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region at 1:59 am. The recovery team will make initial processing of the capsule and then use a plane to transport it to Beijing where it will be opened for technicians to remove the container holding lunar samples, the administration said. The reentry and landing started around 1 am when mission controllers uploaded high-accuracy navigation data to the orbiter-reentry capsule combination that was traveling around the Earth. The capsule then separated from the orbiter about 5,000 kilometers above the southern Atlantic Ocean and began to descend toward Earth. It entered the atmosphere at the second cosmic velocity, or 11.2 kilometers per second at 1:33 am, and soon bounced off the atmosphere to further slow down its ultrafast speed that could cause damage to the vehicle. Later, the craft reentered the atmosphere at a much slower speed of about 7.9 km per second, also known as the first cosmic velocity. When the module was about 10 km above the ground, it released its parachutes and smoothly landed on the snow-covered grasslands. Recovery personnel sent from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center soon came to the landing site in helicopters and off-road vehicles. The successful landing marked the completion of the historic 23-day Chang'e 5 expedition, the first in more than 40 years, to bring lunar samples back to Earth, also making China the third country to achieve this feat after the United States and the former Soviet Union. autonomous region, on Dec 17, 2020. [Photo by Batbayar/For China Daily] Next, the sealed samples will be transferred to specially designed laboratories for analyses, experiments and tests so scientists can determine the extraterrestrial substances' composition, structure and traits, thus deepening their knowledge about the history of the moon and the solar system. A certain proportion of the samples will also be on public display to enhance science awareness among the public, especially young generations, sources close to the mission have said. Chang'e 5, China's largest and most advanced lunar probe, consisted of four main components — an orbiter, lander, ascender and reentry capsule. The spacecraft was launched by a Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket early on Nov 24 at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in South China's Hainan province, setting out on China's most difficult space activity and the world's first lunar sample-return mission since 1976.