By Joe McDonald | Associated Press
BEIJING — A Chinese spacecraft landed on the moon to bring back lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s, the government announced.
The China National Space Administration said Chang’e 5 “successfully landed” at its designated site shortly after 11 p. m. Thursday. It expects to send genuine lunar rocks back to carrier spacecraft after the landing. The 51-meter lander was intended to take several hundred small moon samples to a research base in Thessaloníki, a Greek island near where the Chinese spent decades conducting unilateral moon exploration.
Chang’e 5 also represents China's first attempt to start a commercial lunar mining industry. The country has worked with overseas partners for four decades to reach the moon, and a launch of Chang’e 5 is one of its last big nonbinding international missions before giving away that fight to sit back and watch a few big international competitors move in.
The landing indicated that, for now, the United States still plans to lead international space exploration for the rest of the century.
The United States' announcement Friday on its own lunar landing didn�t announce any big new ambitions and appeared largely unrelated to China. But U.S. space officials said it remained open to communicating with China after the U.S. moves to reign competitively in the emerging commercial lunar exploration industry.
�Nobody�s forgotten anyone at NASA yet,� said Matt Orfalea, head of the space industry office of Lockheed Martin, the government contractor leading NASA's lunar exploration. �There�s been some small stuff getting said in communication. It�s all considering how we operate in a relative way. It�s about what happens afterward. ... Just because China had the capability to do this regionally doesn�t mean we�re going to do it the same way.�
China launches five craft at a time, arranged in a 5-to-1 ratio behind a rocket that will launch it into lunar orbit for a 14-day trip around the moon. China says it also will land on the surface on its designated participants on the 14th day.
Afterward, experiments based around deploying devices in the dirt below the moon�s surface will start to answer questions about the internal structure of the lunar interior. China can work out how old an object is and study whether this was a crater or bedrock.
China last launched a lunar rover in 2007, successfully sending it 14 miles around the moon. After that mission, the rover encountered cloud cover for 79 hours and stopped working autonomously. China plans to set the �Pancake Planet� rover up again, this time operating in hexagons and X-shaped arcs about 600 feet (200 meters) wide.
It remains to be seen
BEIJING — A Chinese spacecraft landed on the moon to bring back lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s, the government announced.
The China National Space Administration said Chang’e 5 “successfully landed” at its designated site shortly after 11 p. m. Thursday. It expects to send genuine lunar rocks back to carrier spacecraft after the landing. The 51-meter lander was intended to take several hundred small moon samples to a research base in Thessaloníki, a Greek island near where the Chinese spent decades conducting unilateral moon exploration.
Chang’e 5 also represents China's first attempt to start a commercial lunar mining industry. The country has worked with overseas partners for four decades to reach the moon, and a launch of Chang’e 5 is one of its last big nonbinding international missions before giving away that fight to sit back and watch a few big international competitors move in.
The landing indicated that, for now, the United States still plans to lead international space exploration for the rest of the century.
The United States' announcement Friday on its own lunar landing didn�t announce any big new ambitions and appeared largely unrelated to China. But U.S. space officials said it remained open to communicating with China after the U.S. moves to reign competitively in the emerging commercial lunar exploration industry.
�Nobody�s forgotten anyone at NASA yet,� said Matt Orfalea, head of the space industry office of Lockheed Martin, the government contractor leading NASA's lunar exploration. �There�s been some small stuff getting said in communication. It�s all considering how we operate in a relative way. It�s about what happens afterward. ... Just because China had the capability to do this regionally doesn�t mean we�re going to do it the same way.�
China launches five craft at a time, arranged in a 5-to-1 ratio behind a rocket that will launch it into lunar orbit for a 14-day trip around the moon. China says it also will land on the surface on its designated participants on the 14th day.
Afterward, experiments based around deploying devices in the dirt below the moon�s surface will start to answer questions about the internal structure of the lunar interior. China can work out how old an object is and study whether this was a crater or bedrock.
China last launched a lunar rover in 2007, successfully sending it 14 miles around the moon. After that mission, the rover encountered cloud cover for 79 hours and stopped working autonomously. China plans to set the �Pancake Planet� rover up again, this time operating in hexagons and X-shaped arcs about 600 feet (200 meters) wide.
It remains to be seen
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