A Chinese space probe yesterday began drilling on the surface of the moon hours after landing, in an ambitious attempt to bring back the first lunar samples in four decades.
Beijing has poured billions into its military-run space program, with hopes of having a crewed space station by 2022 and of eventually sending humans to the moon.
The Chang’e 5 spacecraft — named for the mythical Chinese moon goddess — touched down on the near side of the moon on Tuesday, and is gathering samples from the surface, the China National Space Administration said.
Chang’e 5’s goal is to collect lunar rocks and soil to help scientists learn about the moon’s origins, formation and volcanic activity.
If the return journey is successful, China would be only the third country to have retrieved samples from the moon, following the US and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.
This is the first such attempt since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976.
State media yesterday described the mission as “one of China’s most complicated and challenging space missions so far.”
The probe had finished drilling for samples by the morning and is “gathering surface samples as planned,” the space agency said.
The probe was launched from China’s southern Hainan Province last week and entered lunar orbit on Saturday after a 112-hour journey.
State broadcaster China Central Television showed rows of scientists at mission control, wearing blue jackets emblazoned with Chinese flags, monitoring the probe then clapping after it successfully touched down.
A huge screen at the front of the room displayed images sent by the probe of the gray lunar surface.
The spacecraft plans to collect 2kg of material in a previously unexplored area known as Oceanus Procellarum — or “Ocean of Storms” — a vast lava plain, according to the science journal Nature.
The probe was designed to both get samples from the moon’s surface, as well as drill a 2m deep hole and gather specimens from there, to ensure a diverse collection.
State media said the craft was preparing for “around 48 hours” of tasks on the lunar surface.
The samples would then be returned to Earth in a capsule programmed to land in China’s Inner Mongolia region this month, NASA has said.
The mission is technically challenging and involves several innovations not seen during previous attempts at collecting moon rocks, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Jonathan McDowell told reporters last month.
Thomas Zurbuchen, a top official at NASA’s science mission directorate, congratulated China on the landing.
“This is no easy task,” he wrote on Twitter. “When the samples collected on the Moon are returned to Earth, we hope everyone will benefit from being able to study this precious cargo that could advance the international science community.”
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