Chang'e 6: China's lunar probe returns to Earth with rock and soil samples

Bangkok (AFP) – China Chang'e 6 probe It returned to Earth with samples of rocks and soil from the far side of the moon, which has been little explored, in a world first.

The probe landed in the Inner Mongolia region of northern China on Tuesday afternoon.

“I now declare that the Chang'e 6 lunar exploration mission has been a complete success,” Zhang Kejian, director of the China National Space Administration, said in a televised press conference after the landing.

Chinese scientists expect the returned samples to include 2.5 million-year-old volcanic rocks and other materials that scientists hope will answer questions about geographic differences on either side of the Moon.

The near side is what is seen from Earth, and the far side faces outer space. The far side is also known to contain mountains and meteorite craters, which contrasts with the relatively flat areas that can be seen on the near side.

The probe landed in the Aitken Basin at the moon's south pole, a crater that formed more than 4 billion years ago. The samples scientists expect will likely come from different layers of the basin, which will bear traces of different geological events across its long chronology, such as when the Moon was younger and had an active interior that could produce volcanic rocks.

While previous American and Soviet missions collected samples from the near side of the Moon, the Chinese mission was the first to collect samples from the far side.

“This is a world first in the sense that it is the first time anyone has been able to lift off from the far side of the moon and bring back samples,” said Richard de Grace, professor of astrophysics at Macquarie University in Australia.

The moon program is part of a growing rivalry with the United States – which remains a leader in space exploration – and others, including… Japan And India. China has placed its own space station in orbit on a regular basis Sends crews there.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory message to Chang'e's team, saying it was a “historic achievement in our country's efforts to become a space and technology power.”

The probe left Earth on May 3. Her journey took 53 days. The probe drilled into the core and extracted rocks from the surface.

The samples are expected to answer one of the fundamental scientific questions in lunar science research: What geological activity is responsible for the differences between the two sides? Zhongyu Yu, a geoscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement issued in Innovation Monday, a journal published in partnership with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In recent years, China has launched several successful missions to the moon, collecting samples from the near side of the moon using the Chang'e 5 probe in the past.

They also hope that the probe will return with materials bearing traces of meteorite strikes from the moon's past. This material could shed light on the early days of the solar system. There is a theory that the Moon acted as a vacuum cleaner of sorts, attracting all the meteorites and debris of the previous regime's era so they would not collide with Earth, said De Griggs, who is also executive director at the International Space Science Institute. Beijing.

China said it plans to share the samples with international scientists, although it did not say exactly which countries they are located in.

___

AP video producer Olivia Chang contributed to this report.