The Chinese Chang'e-5 probe is on the moon

After 44 years, a vehicle has landed again on the moon to collect samples of rocks and bring them to Earth: the lander of the Chinese mission Chang'e 5 is preparing for an intense week, during which it will have to drill and dig the lunar soil to collect them samples, pack them up and leave to return to Earth in mid-December.

So far the last moon rocks had been brought to Earth in 1976 by the former Soviet Union's Luna 24 mission.

It was a robotic mission, as is the Chinese Chang'e 5. Before then, the samples of the lunar soil had instead been collected by astronauts: the historic Apollo 11 mission of NASA had done it, the first to bring man to the moon , and then the Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 missions, for a total of over 382 kilograms of moon rocks.

Launched on November 23 from the Wenchang base, on the island of Hainan, with the Long Marcia 5 rocket, the mission of the Chinese space agency CNSA aims to make China the third country in the world to be able to collect moon rocks, after the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The landing took place punctually in the Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, a more recent region than those so far visited by the other lunar missions.

Soon after landing on the ground, the Chang'e 5 mission lander deployed solar panels and antennas to communicate with Earth.

The goal is to collect two kilograms of materials, taken by digging to a depth of two meters.

If all goes as planned, the Chang'e 5 lander is expected to leave lunar soil on Thursday to return to orbit the moon, using its landing pad as a launch pad.

The vehicle will have to dock with the orbital module on Saturday, where it will have to transfer the samples.

The return to Earth is scheduled for December 17 in an internal area of ​​Mongolia.

The departure from the lunar soil will be another challenge.

In fact, since the 1970s, a lunar landing module has not left the surface of the Moon to rejoin its orbital module.

The main difficulty is that the trajectory of the launch cannot be accurately calculated until after landing, based on the precise point where the vehicle landed.

The Chang'e 5 mission was the third moon landing of a Chinese mission.

The first took place in 2013 with the Chang'e 3 mission and the second in 2019, with the Chang'e 4, the first spacecraft to land on the far side of the Moon.