China Launches Moon Mission to Bring Lunar Rocks Back to Earth

China on Tuesday launched its most complex lunar mission to date: sending a spacecraft to the surface of the moon to bring rock and soil samples back to Earth for the first time in almost half a century.

The mission, dubbed Chang’e-5, is the fifth lunar expeditions China has launched since 2007. (Chang’e, pronounced “chang-uh,” is the name of the Chinese goddess of the moon.) It is China’s latest effort in an ambitious national space program that seeks to establish a research station and human colony on the lunar surface by as early as the 2030s. 

This particular spacecraft’s key task is to drill about two meters beneath the moon's surface and scoop up several kilograms of debris to be brought back to Earth. It will allow scientists to study newly obtained lunar material for the first time since the American and Russian missions of the 60s and 70s. 

The Chang’e-5 lander is expected to touch down near a volcanic plain called Mons Rümker, on the moon’s near side, and bring back the youngest samples ever at 1.2 billion years old. The Soviet Luna and American Apollo missions all targeted areas of the moon that were more than three billion years old.

If successful, the mission will make China only the third country to bring pieces of the moon back to Earth, and signal a major advance for the national’s rapidly developing space program.

The spacecraft was launched atop a giant Long March-5Y rocket, taking from the Wenchang space site at the Chinese island province of Hainan on Tuesday morning and broadcast live by Chinese state media. It separated from the rocket's first and second stages just minutes after launch and entered into an Earth-Moon transfer orbit, before opening its solar panels to supply its independent power source. It is now on course for the moon.

Chang’e-5 should reach the lunar surface within a week, and once it gets there it will only have a single lunar day—the equivalent of 14 Earth days—to complete its tasks.

The lander is not equipped with the radioisotope heating units it needs to withstand the moon's freezing nights, when temperatures can dip to minus 170 degrees Celcius (or minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit). This means the Chang’e-5 lander must finish drilling and blast off with the samples before the sun sets. It will then dock with an orbiter and head back to Earth. 

By the time the spacecraft lands in the Inner Mongolia region of China on December 16 or 17, it is expected to be carrying up to four kilograms of materials. Planetary scientists are hoping those moon rocks can then be used to estimate the ages of geological surfaces on the planets, moons and asteroids throughout the solar system, and ascertain when volcanic eruptions occurred.

China is the only nation to have successfully put robotic spacecraft on the surface of the moon so far this century: first with Chang’e-3, which in December 2013 became the first spacecraft to soft-land on lunar surface since 1976, and then with Chang’e-4, which in January 2019 became the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the moon. In July 2020, China also sent an orbiter, lander and rover to Mars, with plans to land on the surface of the red planet some time next year.

Meanwhile, Russia is planning to send three unmanned craft to the moon and achieve a human landing by 2030, and NASA has released plans to “lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.”

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