China Luna Sample Return

China’s first sample return mission, Chang’e-5, was launch Launched 23 Nov 2020 on a Long March 5 rocket.

After the remarkable success of Chang'e 5 returning 1.731Kg of lunar samples from the Moon Chinese Scientist look forward to adding improvements to its upcoming Chang'e 6 mission in 2022 or early 2023 to sample and explore the Lunar South pole.

April 2022 update: Chang'6 delayed until 2024/5 to allow for China to set up a constellation around the moon to provide communication and navigation services for future operations on the lunar surface.

It Lunar landing at Mons Rümker in Dec 2020

Chang'e 5 Spacecraft Launches In Search Of The Youngest Moon Rocks

In Jan 2022 the Chang'E-5 Lander Makes First Onsite Detection Of Water On The Moon

China Moon sample return mission Chang'e 5 originally in November 2017

China Luna progress 2 Jan 2017

Scientists working on China's Luna landing and ascent vehicles

The lander and ascender form a combination that will land on the moon to conduct unmanned sample collection mission, This complex mission will involve a number of stages and components that will combine to land on and collect samples from the Moon, before ascending, and docking in lunar orbit, and heading home the lander, ascent stage and re-entry vehicle with the samples taken back to Earth by the re-entry capsule.

launch using a Long March 5 booster lifting off from the newly completed Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province.

The landing site is to be Mons Rümker region within a part of the moon’s Oceanus Procellarum.

Chang’e-5’s sampling system allows both scoop samples and coring.

Potent tool

“I believe that the mission, if successful, will prove a new landmark achievement for China, with important implications for the international space community too,” said Marco Aliberti, a resident fellow of the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna and author of the 2015 book “When China Goes to the Moon…”

“Technically, it is the most sophisticated and difficult exploration mission China will embark upon during the country’s 13th five-year plan, because of the many technological breakthroughs that China has not yet fully mastered,” Aliberti told SpaceNews.

Important firsts for China include encapsulation of lunar samples, liftoff from the lunar surface, lunar-orbit-rendezvous- and docking-operations and re-entry at high speed back to Earth.

Chang'e-5 returned samples from the Moon in mid Dec 2020

See also Chang'e 4 robotic landing on the moon’s farside, It achieved humanity's first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, on 3 January 2019.

The International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), is to be situated in the lunar south pole region