China successfully completed its most complex space mission to date on Thursday and has taken a giant step forward in the development of its space program.
The
Chang'e 5
probe
it has landed safely back in the frozen steppes of Inner Mongolia, carrying nearly two kilos of moon rocks after a three-week mission.
Those samples are the first brought to Earth in 44 years and experts hope they will shed light on the history of the Moon and the solar system.
They are among the "youngest" taken from our satellite, with an age that experts estimate between one thousand and two billion years.
Images broadcast by Chinese state television CCTV have shown the probe parachuting from night skies to the snowy ground.
A group of scientists in trucks rushed to her rescue, nailing the Chinese flag, red with five yellow stars, to the ground.
The rocks, subjected for millions of years to impacts from meteorites, solar wind and cosmic ray radiation, will be guarded in a laboratory built especially for them in Beijing, where experts will examine them to obtain data on the evolution of the Moon along of millions of years.
"These samples will be a treasure!" Said the professor of Planetary Sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis Bradley Jolliff, in a statement.
"The rocks that
Chang'e 5
has collected and brought to earth are among some of the youngest volcanic surfaces on the Moon," he added.
"Determining its exact age will provide essential information for a part of the lunar chronology that we currently do not know," added the expert.
The American Apollo missions collected rocks older than 3 billion years.
“And all recent impact craters whose ages have been determined from sample analysis are less than a billion years old.
So the
Chang'e 5
samples
fill
a huge gap. "
Also, Joliff points out, they can help answer another big question: why the volcanic activity on the Moon lasted for so long.
Until now it was believed that this activity had ended about 3.5 billion years ago, although some more recent observations of the lunar surface suggest that perhaps the core of the satellite remained active until just a thousand or two billion years ago.
The
Chang'e 5
mission
departed on November 24 and landed on December 1 in the vicinity of Mount Rüker, a volcanic area at 1,300 meters of altitude and until now unexplored in the northwest of the immense lava plain known as Oceanus Procellarum. (ocean of storms).
Experts consider that this area is 1.2 billion years old.
There he dug two meters deep with a robotic arm to extract the samples and left a Chinese flag displayed for the first time on the lunar surface.
With the success of this mission, China has become the third country in the world, behind the United States and the former Soviet Union, to complete a round trip to the Moon to bring back samples from its surface.
It is a major achievement for a space program to which he attaches strategic importance, especially in light of his geopolitical rivalry with the United States and as his government aspires to make innovation the great engine of its economy for decades to come.
The Chinese space program has developed exponentially in the last twenty years, motivated in part by NASA's veto to collaborate on joint programs.
If in 2003 Beijing sent its first astronaut into space, this year it sent a probe to Mars and plans to set up a space station by 2022.
The predecessors of this mission,
Chang'e 1
and 2, were limited to orbit the moon.
Chang'e 3
managed to place a first rover robot,
Yutu
(jade hare),
on the satellite floor
, which stopped working after a few days.
Chang'e 4
landed on the far side of the Moon, something that had not been achieved until then, with another robot,
Yutu2
, which remains operational until now.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has congratulated the mission, named Chang'e in honor of a goddess who, according to the country's tradition, lives on the Moon.
As the most complicated space project that its scientists have undertaken so far,
Chang'e 5
“marks a great step forward in the Chinese space industry and will contribute to deepening knowledge about the origin of the Moon and the history of the evolution of the solar system. ", has held.