China launches mission to bring lunar rocks to Earth

China aims to mark a new milestone in space exploration this week, after sending a mission to Mars last July.

A space probe,

, is scheduled to launch towards the Moon this Tuesday, Monday night in Spain to collect rocks and other soil samples and transport them to Earth, in the first mission of its kind in more than forty years.

Scientists hope that, if successful, the mission will allow a better understanding of how our satellite evolved, and even more precisely date the surfaces of other planets, such as Mars or Mercury.

Everything is ready at the Wenchang space base on the tropical Chinese island of Hainan.

Technicians have already started filling the tanks of the Long March-5 rocket that will carry the probe with fuel.

If all goes well, and although the weather forecast is for some clouds, during the early hours of Tuesday the launch will take place in a window between 04.00 and 05.00 (21.00 and 22.00 in Spain), as confirmed by the agency this Monday. Xinhua News Agency.

The liftoff will be the last in a series of increasingly technically complex Chinese lunar missions.

The

probe

, so called in reference to a goddess who, according to Chinese tradition, lives on the Moon, weighs eight tons and is made up of four modules, which will be in charge of the orbit around the satellite, and the moon landing, respectively. , lunar takeoff and return to land.

If the mission is successful, the lunar lander will reach a hitherto unexplored point on the closest face of the moon, in the vicinity of Mount Rümker, a volcanic area at 1,300 meters altitude in the region known as

(“ Ocean of Storms ”), a vast plain of dark lava visible from Earth.

There, the probe will excavate the lunar surface to a depth of about two meters and collect about two kilos of dust and rock.

The operation will last one lunar day, equivalent to two Earth weeks;

It cannot be prolonged since the cold at night on the satellite, with temperatures reaching 170 degrees below zero, could affect the operation of the delicate mechanisms of the space engine.

The return module will store the samples and bring them back to our planet.

The probe is expected to land back in early December at a point in China's Inner Mongolia province.

His uneventful return would make China the third country to successfully transport lunar material, something that has so far only been achieved by the United States and the Soviet Union, in missions launched in the 1960s and 1970s;

the last of these, the Soviet Luna 24, was completed in 1976.

Success would also mean that China has managed to complete the third and final phase of its current lunar program: orbit, land and return.

He had already accomplished the first two: his previous mission,

, reached the far side of the Moon in January 2019.

In 2013 it had managed to deposit its first lunar ground rover, Yutu or Jade Hare, on the satellite floor.

His uneventful return would make China the third country to successfully transport lunar material.

"This is the first unmanned mission to collect samples and return from the Moon," said the spokesman for the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA), Pei Zhaoyu, in statements collected by Chinese state television.

"This work is more complicated than collecting samples from the lunar soil by hand."

The mission had been scheduled for 2017, but had to be postponed due to a failure in the Long March rocket.

This time, one of the people in charge of the design of this rocket, Liu Bing, stressed that “other previous launches have proven certain key technologies, so this time we have more confidence.

Now we focus on control measures at the launch site. "

Experts trust that the material obtained, rocks subjected for millions of years to impacts from meteorites, solar wind and cosmic ray radiation, sheds light on how the Moon evolved.

Until now, it was believed that the satellite's volcanic activity ended about 3.5 billion years ago, although some more recent observations of the lunar surface suggest that perhaps the satellite's core was active until just a thousand or two billion years ago.

China has invested billions of euros in the development of its space program, which it considers one of the pillars of its plan to become a great economic and diplomatic power in the coming decades.

Since he sent his first astronaut into space in 2003, he has set out to take a manned mission to the Moon in the next decade and hopes to set up a space station by 2022. The success of

could open the way for future ones too. Similar round-trip scans of planets like Mars.

In July, China launched its Tianwen spacecraft, consisting of an orbital module and a rover, towards Mars.

That mission, which scientists expect to reach the red planet around February next year, will look for signs of the presence of water.

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