On the moon, the lander of the Chinese mission Chang'e 5 has completed the collection of the rocks and has left the lunar soil to deliver the samples to the vehicle in orbit, which will return them to Earth in mid-December. Earth the first samples of lunar rocks after 44 years, while the signals of the take-off from the ground were recorded by a radio amateur.
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The spacecraft took off from Oceanus Procellarum and reached lunar orbit six minutes more.
The vehicle will now have to meet the mother probe in orbit around the Moon and then transfer its precious cargo to the capsule destined to return to Earth.
The maneuver, extremely demanding, is the first coupling between two robotic vehicles in the lunar orbit and must be done automatically due to the delay in communication, due to the distance of about 380,000 kilometers between the Earth and the Moon.
The meeting between the two spacecraft is scheduled for Saturday 5 December and the expected duration for the docking maneuver is about three and a half hours.
If all goes according to forecasts, the capsule with the samples should re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and land in Inner Mongolia in mid-December, becoming the first probe to return lunar samples to Earth since 1976, that is, since the time of the robotic mission Luna 24 of the Soviet Union.
The Chang'e 5 mission began on November 23rd when the probe was launched with the Long March 5 rocket, reached the Moon after a four and a half day journey and, after entering its orbit, landed the first December.
For China it was the third mission to land on the lunar surface, after the Chang'e 3 mission in 2013 and Chang'e 4 in 2019 which was the first probe to reach the far side of the moon.
