China is the first nation to recover rocks from the far side of the moon.
The latest accomplishment of China’s lunar exploration programme is the sample from the Chang’e-6 mission, which may contain information about Earth’s and the moon’s ancient history.
China achieved the most recent milestone in an ambitious plan to study the moon and other regions of the solar system on Tuesday when it successfully descended a capsule full of lunar soil from the far side of the moon to Earth.
The sample, which was recovered by the Chang'e-6 lander of the China National Space Administration during a 53-day mission, demonstrates China's expanding space capabilities and marks another success in a string of lunar missions that began in 2007 and have so far been carried out essentially flawlessly.
Chang'e-6, according to Long Xiao, a planetary geologist at China University of Geosciences, "is the first mission in human history to return samples from the far side of the moon," in an email. He went on, "This is a cause for celebration for all humanity and a major event for scientists worldwide."
Such views, together with the possibility of international exchanges of lunar samples, emphasised the hope that China's robotic lunar and Martian missions will contribute to the advancement of solar system science. Views held in Washington and elsewhere, however, suggest that Tuesday's accomplishment is merely the most recent development in a space competition with geopolitical connotations that dates back to the twenty-first century.
An American spacecraft that was privately owned touched down on the moon in February. NASA is also working on the Artemis programme to get Americans back to the moon, but due to technological difficulties, the agency's next mission—an astronaut fly around the moon—has been postponed. In the upcoming years, China also hopes to increase the number of robots it sends to the moon and eventually sends human astronauts there.
It has been gradually advancing towards that objective by carrying out a robotic lunar exploration programme that it developed several years in advance. Initially designed to honour the Chinese moon goddess Chang'e (pronounced “chong-uh”), the program's initial two missions circled the moon in order to capture images and compile a surface map.
Next was Chang'e-3, which in 2013 made a near-side landing on the moon and sent its rover, Yutu-1, into orbit. Chang'e-4, the first vehicle to visit the moon's far side and land the Yutu-2 rover there, came after it in 2019.
Chang'e-5, which delivered over four pounds of near-side lunar regolith to Earth, made its landing one year later. China is now only the third nation, after the US and the USSR, to have successfully completed the intricate orbital choreography required to gather a sample from the moon.
The manoeuvres of Chang'e-5 and Chang'e-6, according to Yuqi Qian, a lunar geologist at the University of Hong Kong, are both practice runs for China's next crewed moon missions. These missions, like the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, require landing on the moon and then launching humans from it.
China's long-term strategy includes paying scientific advantages for comprehending the solar system while working towards sending astronauts to the moon. Compared to the lunar material gathered by the Soviets or Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, the Chang'e-5 sample was younger. The primary component of it is basalt, which is cooled lava from previous volcanic eruptions. The basalts were estimated by two Chinese-led study teams to be roughly two billion years old, indicating that volcanic activity on the moon continued for at least a billion years after the time period inferred from Soviet and American Luna and Apollo samples.
