Chang’e missions, a tale of Chinese spatial successes

Chinese mission Chang’e 5 landed safely on the moon’s desolated surface. It has collected samples of lunar soil and brought them back to earth for analysis.

China’s Chang’e missions continue to unfold successfully. Named after the Chinese goddess of the Moon, the relatively young Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) is securing increasingly complex objectives proving once and for all the tremendous pace of China’s technological progress.

Launched in 2007, Chang’e 1, and its sister mission Chang’e 2 (2010) prepared the field for the later stages of the CLEP missions. Both were tasked with the mapping of the surface of our satellite, to prepare for Chang’e 3 (2013), which had the more complicated goal of landing on our satellite and deploying a rover. Chang’e 3 was a partial success, as the landing and deployment went as planned, but the rover Yutu stopped transmitting after ‘technical abnormalities’ in March 2015.

All of those missions however, had already been done by Americans and Russians alike in the 1970’s, and while still an impressive (and expensive) feat, they did not impress the world. Chang’e 4 achieved an unprecedented exploit: it landed on the far side of the moon. This involves a relay satellite (Queqiao) orbiting around Earth's L2 Lagrange point to relay communications between the lander and China, along with the Yutu-2 rover, which broke the Lunar longevity record. Besides, Chang’e 4 landed on the Lunar South Pole, a previously unexplored region of great strategic and scientific interest. Indeed, the South Pole is bathed in near constant sunlight, making it the ideal location for the settlement of a lunar base, while the region’s deep craters are ‘cold traps’ containing ice brought by comet impacts whose study will help unveil many mysteries surrounding the formation of our solar system.

Chang’e 5 weighs an equally strong symbolism: it has collected samples from the Moon and returned them to Earth. Chang’e 5’s lander touched the moon surface on the third of December 2020 and has collected roughly 2kg of lunar rocks. It then took-off from the moon, rendez-vouded with the orbiter, and transferred the samples into the latter module which made the trip back to earth, and landed in inner Mongolia on the sixteenth of December.

This incredibly complex achievement had only been done by the USA and the USSR before, and China therefore enters the extremely selective club of countries to have collected and returned extra-terrestrial materials. This mission illustrates the increasingly complex yet ever successful progress of the CLEP.

Chang’e 6 is due to collect samples from the far side of the Moon, and will be a crucial rehearsal for future Chinese inhabited missions to the Moon, which are set to begin in the 2030’s. Should China manage to land on the Moon before the US returns, this would be a huge blow for the NASA, equal to those the USSR inflicted it through the 50’s and 60’s when it became the first nation to launch an artificial satellite (Sputnik in 1957), to send a living being into orbit (Laïka in 1957), a man into orbit (Gagarin in 1961), and an artificial object onto the Moon (Luna 2 in 1959).

Further Readings:

China's Chang'e-5 mission returns Moon samples

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