China's Chang'e-5 successfully landed at its designated landing area in Siwangzi Banner, N China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region around 2 am Thursday, carrying around 2 kgs of lunar samples. Photos show workers checking craft's status.
Chang'e-5 is one of the most complex and challenging missions in China's aerospace history, and brought back the country's first-ever soil samples from an extraterrestrial body, said Wu Yanhua, vice administrator of the CNSA and deputy chief commander of the China Lunar Exploration Program, at a press conference on the Chang'e 5 mission.
On Nov. 24, a Long March-5 rocket carrying the Chang』e-5 probe blasted off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan province.
After two orbital corrections, Chang'e-5 probe decelerated and entered the lunar orbit on Nov. 28.
The lander-ascender combination of the probe separated from the orbiter-returner combination, and successfully landed on the near side of the moon and started sampling on Dec. 1.
After grabbing samples, the ascender of Chang'e-5 took off from the lunar surface and entered the preset lunar orbit on Dec. 3. Later, it rendezvoused and docked with the orbiter-returner combination in lunar orbit, and transferred the samples to the returner.
After conducting orbital maneuver twice, the orbiter-returner entered the moon-Earth transfer orbit.
China's Chang'e-5 probe retrieved about 1,731 grams of samples from the moon, according to the China National Space Administration.
The samples were transferred to the Chinese research teams Saturday morning.
Scientists will carry out the storage, analysis and research of the country's first samples collected from the extraterrestrial object.
The return capsule of Chang'e-5 probe landed in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the early hours of Thursday, bringing back the samples collected from the moon.