China is going back to the Moon for more samples.<\/p>\n
On Friday the country launched its largest rocket, the Long March 5, carrying an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft. The combined mass of the Chang\u2019e-6 spacecraft is about 8 metric tons, and it will attempt to return rocks and soil from the far side of the Moon\u2014something scientists have never been able to study before in-depth.<\/p>\n
The mission\u2019s goal is to bring about 2 kg (4.4 pounds) of rocks back to Earth a little more than a month from now.<\/p>\n
Chang\u2019e-6 builds upon the Chinese space program\u2019s successful lunar program. In 2019, the Chang\u2019e-4 mission made a soft landing on the far side of the Moon, the first time this had ever been done by a spacecraft. The far side is more challenging than the near side, because line-of-sight communications are not possible with Earth.<\/p>\n
Then, in late 2020, the Chang\u2019e-5 mission landed on the near side of the Moon and successfully collected 1.7 kg of rocks. These were subsequently blasted off the surface of the Moon and returned to China where they have been studied since. It marked the first time in half a century, since efforts by the United States and Soviet Union, that samples were returned from the Moon.<\/p>\n
The latest Chinese flight to the Moon launched Friday will synthesize the country\u2019s learnings from its last two missions, by collecting and returning samples from the far side of the Moon.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the Chang\u2019e-6 mission can achieve its goal, it will provide scientists with the first direct evidence to understand the environment and material composition of the far side of the moon, which is of great significance,\u201d said Wu Weiren, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief designer of China\u2019s lunar exploration program.<\/p>\n
This mission follows the launch and deployment of the Queqiao-2 relay satellite in March, which will serve as a bridge between communications from the far side of the Moon to operators back on Earth. China has also announced two future lunar missions, Chang\u2019e-7 and Chang\u2019e-8, later this decade. These robotic missions will land near the lunar South Pole, test lunar resources, and prepare the way for future crewed missions.<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Nominally, China\u2019s current plan calls for the first landing of two taikonauts on the surface of the Moon in 2029 or 2030. Eventually it wants to establish a lunar outpost.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s lunar missions are not operating in a vacuum\u2014OK, technically, they are\u2014but the point here is that China\u2019s exploration efforts are proceeding alongside a parallel effort by the United States, NASA, and about three dozen partners under the auspices of the Artemis program.<\/p>\n
After decades of focusing its exploration efforts elsewhere, NASA finally turned back to the Moon about seven years ago. Since that time it has worked alongside the commercial space industry to develop a plan for a sustainable return to the lunar surface.<\/p>\n
From the outside, China\u2019s lunar program appears to be in the lead. It is difficult to argue about the string of successes with the Chang\u2019e lunar program and the unprecedented landing on the far side of the Moon. If Chang\u2019e-6 proves successful, that will be another strike in favor of China\u2019s lunar program.<\/p>\n
But to its credit, NASA is not simply seeking to replicate the glories of its Apollo lunar program in the 1960s and early 1970s. China\u2019s first lunar mission with astronauts, for example, is intended to land two taikonauts on the Moon for just a few hours. The vehicles will be fully expendable, as were the Apollo rockets and spacecraft more than half a century ago.<\/p>\n
NASA is taking a different approach, working with industry to develop a fleet of commercial cargo landers\u2014such as Intuitive Machines\u2019 largely successful Odysseus<\/em> mission earlier this year\u2014as well as larger human landers built by SpaceX and Blue Origin. This overall \u201carchitecture\u201d is far more complex, requiring myriad launches to refuel spacecraft in orbit. It will likely take several years longer to get to the first lunar landing missions, either later this decade or earlier in the 2030s. But should NASA persist and succeed in this approach, it will open up a highway to the Moon the likes of which could only be dreamed of during the Apollo era. Imagine a flotilla of spacecraft going to and from the Moon. That\u2019s the vision.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s a competition between China\u2019s embrace of a traditional approach versus NASA\u2019s efforts to open the way into some kind of new future. Watching how this lunar competition unfolds over the next decade will be one of the most fascinating stories to follow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China is going back to the Moon for more samples. On Friday the country launched its largest rocket, the Long March 5, carrying an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft. The combined mass of the Chang\u2019e-6 spacecraft is about 8 metric tons, and it will attempt to return rocks and soil from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45222,"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":[1387,9696,21],"class_list":["post-45221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-change-6","tag-china-vs-united-state","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45221"}],"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=45221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}