This moonshot will send about 8200 kilos thataway, with the intention of returning 2 kilos of stuff from an interestingly young crater. Chang'e 5 | Long March 5 | Prelaunch Preview | Everyday Astronaut
Busy folks! I was just reading about Tianhe....(the CHICOMMS not-so-ISS....SS) which will be another "customer" of the CZ-5.
In orbit and to deploy the sample getter soon China's Chang'e 5 enters lunar orbit for historic attempt to return moon samples | Space
Soil analysis comparison to our familiar side might be revealing. The “dark side of the moon” is quite the opposite.
Chang'4 is on far side and doing some science described by https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2018.02.011 Published so far is that ionizing radiation flux is high there. Some chemical properties of surface regolith will come out - maybe they already have.
Observe fullish moon in current night sky. Near side is lit. Chang'e 5 will be down and up, success or fail, before 'night' arrives.
Wishing success. Adding to human knowledge is a good thing. Now about all the pollution from all of these rocket launches. Does Tesla's cars save more than Elon's rockets cause? Quizz at 11.
Samples are 'in the can', surface thing will next dock with earth return thing. I want to say that autonomous docking in lunar orbit is the last tricky phase of this mission. But that could invoke bad luck?
This reminds me of Germans giving their chemical elements names like sauerstoff and wasserstoff. I guess we do the same, but by way of Greek, so it seems more exotic.
In other sample-return news, Hayabusa's gram of asteroid has already been recovered in Australia Hayabusa2 mission lands the first subsurface asteroid sample on Earth That's the good stuff. the 5 billion year old stuff. We hope.
Lunar orbit has been made wider. Next burn will leave lunar orbit. Return is one skip off atmosphere, and then stopping in Inner Mongolia. If it stops slowly enough, lunar rocks and dust will not be mixed into local soil
The Japanese returned an astroid sample too: Japan’s Hayabusa2 capsule lands with carbon-rich asteroid samples | Science | AAAS Bob Wilson
Sample size retrieved now much better known: “It was so far beyond our predictions that we were practically at a loss for words. It was really emotional,” said JAXA scientist Hirotaka Sawada, who was present at the opening. “It wasn’t just tiny powdery particles. There were crumbly samples in there with a size of several millimeters.” Japan’s Asteroid Mission Retrieves Lots of Black Dirt - WSJ
