For the first time in more than 40 years, a capsule has returned to Earth carrying samples of rocks from the moon thanks to Chinese spaceship which played on Wednesday afternoon.
According to state media, a capsule from the unmanned Chang’e 5 spacecraft landed with its parachute in the Siziwang district of Inner Mongolia region shortly after 1:00 pm ET Wednesday, early Thursday morning in the region.
Shortly after touching the spacecraft, state media tweeted photos of a ground search and recovery team looking for the capsule at the landing site. He also reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping has congratulated the success of the mission.
Earlier this month, two of the four spacecraft modules landed on the moon. They collected approximately 4.4 pounds of rock and soil samples from the surface after drilling about 6 feet into the moon’s crust on a lava plain that had not been explored until now.
An ascending vehicle then took the samples, stored in a closed container, to the return module to complete what appears successful mission – Another more of a series of increasingly ambitious missions for China’s space program.
On Wednesday, Thomas Zurbuchen, scientific director of NASA, he tweeted a congratulatory message to China after the return of the capsule. “These samples will help reveal secrets of our Earth-Moon system and gain new insights into the history of our solar system,” he said.
While on the moon, the spacecraft, named after a mythical Chinese lunar goddess, raised the Chinese flag for the first time, according to images from China’s National Space Administration. It marked the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to take off again.
Scientists plan to study the samples to find clues about the moon’s origin and formation. The rocks came from a region called Mons Rümker, which is believed to have contained rocks billions of years younger than those previously recovered.
Now China has become the third country in the world to recover samples from the Moon, behind the US and the former Soviet Union.
The last samples returned to Earth with Russia’s Luna-24 mission in 1976. Earlier, American Apollo astronauts returned hundreds of pounds of lunar rocks.