Do you wanna bring back the moon rocks?

《MOON》

BRIEF INTRODUCITION

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IN JANUARY 2019, when a Chinese spacecraft called Chang’e 4 visited the Moon, the mission broke new ground, figuratively speaking, by landing on the far side of that orb, which is perpetually invisible from Earth and thus also out of direct radio contact. 

This meant communications had to be relayed by a satellite which had been cunningly located for the purpose at a place where the interaction of the gravitational fields of Earth and Moon meant it could orbit a point in empty space.

China’s next lunar mission, by contrast, will break ground literally. Chang’e 5, scheduled for launch around November 24th, is intended to drill two metres down into the Moon’s surface, retrieve about 2kg of rock, and then return this to Earth.

The Chang’e missions, named after a Chinese Moon goddess, have had their ups and downs. 

Success depends on a complex ballet involving the craft’s four components. These are a service module, a return-to-Earth module, a lunar lander and an ascender—a configuration originally used by America’s Apollo project. 

Once the mission is in lunar orbit, the lander and the ascender will separate from the orbiting mother ship of service and return modules as a single unit and go down to the surface. 

The landing site is in the northern part of a vast expanse of basalt called Oceanus Procellarum, a previously unvisited area. Researchers hope rocks collected here will confirm that volcanic activity on the Moon continued until far more recently than the 3.5bn years ago that is the estimate derived from studies of currently available samples.

Lunar probe finishes gathering subsurface samples

The lander-ascender combination of China's Chang'e 5 robotic lunar probe has finished gathering subsurface samples and packed them in vacuum container and is continuing collecting surface substances, according to the China National Space Administration.

The administration said in a statement on Wednesday morning that the drilling and packing processes of rocks and soil from 2 meters beneath lunar surface concluded at 4:53 am. A mechanical arm is continuing gathering surface samples.

The combination landed on the moon at 11:11 pm on Tuesday, becoming the third spacecraft that has successfully touched down on the lunar surface this century. The first two craft that had achieved this feat are also from China — the Chang'e 3 and 4.

If everything processes well, the lander-ascender pair would work about two days on a region to the north of Mons Ruemker, a mountain overlooking a vast lunar mare called Oceanus Procellarum, or the Ocean of Storms, on the western edge of the moon's near side. It is tasked with collecting about 2 kilograms of samples.

China's largest and most sophisticated lunar probe, Chang'e 5 was launched by a Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket early on Nov 24 at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, undertaking the world's first mission since 1976 to return lunar samples to Earth.

If the mission is successful, it will make China the third nation to bring samples back from the moon, after the United States and the former Soviet Union.

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来源：The Economist, ChinaDaily, 图片来源于网络，如侵删。

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记者：长谣监制：李璨
责任编辑：戴晨

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