A Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket blasted off at 5:27 pm today at the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, elevating the historic Chang’e 6 robotic mission up into skies.<\/p>\n
If everything goes according to plan, the 20-story-tall colossal rocket will fly for a short time before placing the 8.35-metric-ton Chang’e 6, the heaviest lunar probe China has ever built, on an Earth-moon transfer trajectory.<\/p>\n
The liftoff marked the opening of a complex, challenging journey of the lunar spacecraft toward the far side of the moon.<\/p>\n
If the Chang’e 6 mission succeeds, it will become the first time for rocks and dust to be recovered from the little-known lunar far side, which never faces us due to tidal forces on Earth.<\/p>\n
So far, humankind has fulfilled 10 lunar sample-return missions, but all of the samples were collected from the near side on the moon, leaving scientists around the world calling for a daring attempt to bring substances from the lunar far side, which never faces Earth.<\/p>\n
As one of the world’s most powerful operational rockets, the Long March 5 model was built by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology in Beijing, the nation’s major rocket maker and a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.<\/p>\n
The 57-meter-tall rocket has a liftoff weight of nearly 870 metric tons and is capable of ferrying spacecraft weighing up to 25 tons\uff0dthe combined weight of 16 mid-size car\uff0dto a low-Earth orbit, or 14 tons to a geosynchronous transfer orbit.<\/p>\n
Friday’s flight has become the second time for the Long March 5 rocket model to lift a lunar mission.<\/p>\n
The first time the rocket model was used in a lunar expedition took place in November 2020 as it placed the Chang’e 5, the country’s first lunar sample-return mission, into a moon-bound trajectory.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket blasted off at 5:27 pm today at the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, elevating the historic Chang’e 6 robotic mission up into skies. If everything goes according to plan, the 20-story-tall colossal rocket will fly for a short time before placing the 8.35-metric-ton Chang’e 6, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4332"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}