China launched the Chang'e-6 space probe on Friday May 3 to collect samples from the far side of the Moon, a world first, announced the official Xinhua news agency. A rocket carrying the probe took off from the space launch center in Wenchang, on the southern island of Hainan, shortly before 11:30 a.m. (Paris time).
It is the latest project by China, which the United States says is disguising a military space program under the guise of a civilian program.
The Chang'e-6 mission aims to collect two kilograms of lunar samples from the far side of the Moon and bring them back to Earth for analysis. This is a technically complex mission, lasting fifty-three days.
“Chang’e-6 will collect samples from the far side of the Moon for the first time,” Ge Ping, vice director of the China Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, told reporters. In January 2019, China had already placed a device on the far side of the Moon, but it had not brought back any samples.
The probe must land in a region of the south pole of the Moon, the Aitken basin, whose terrain is particularly complex and steep. Once there, she will collect rocks and conduct experiments in the area where she lands. Her mission completed, she must return to Earth and land at the Wenchang Space Launch Center.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has given China’s “space dream” a boost. The world's second largest economy has injected billions of dollars into its military space program in order to catch up with the United States and Russia.
Beijing has already recorded several successes, including the construction of the Tiangong space station, where a new crew of three astronauts was sent last week. China also landed a rover (a small, motorized “rover”) on Mars. Until then, the United States was the only nation to have successfully landed rovers on the Red Planet.
The United States plans to land astronauts on the Moon in 2026 with their Artemis-3 mission. China also plans to send humans there by 2030.
Samples dating back “around 4 billion years”
China has been excluded from the International Space Station (ISS) since 2011, when the United States banned NASA from collaborating with Beijing. China then developed its own space station project.
The rapid progress of the Chinese space program is causing concern in Washington. In April, Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, claimed that the United States was now engaged in a “race” with Beijing. “We believe that a lot of what they call their civilian space program is actually a military program,” he told a House spending committee in Washington.
Chang'e-6 is the first of three uncrewed missions to the Moon planned by China for this decade. Chang'e-7 will explore the lunar South Pole in search of water, while Chang'e-8 will attempt to establish the technical feasibility of building a lunar base, with Beijing saying a "basic model » will be completed by 2030.
According to scientists, the far side of the Moon - so called because it is invisible from the Earth and not because it never captures the Sun's rays - is very promising for research, because its craters are less covered by ancient lava flows than those on the near side. This could therefore mean that it will be easier to collect materials to better understand how the Moon formed.
“The samples collected by Chang’e-6 will have a geological age of around 4 billion years,” Ge estimated. “Collecting lunar samples from different regions and geological ages and carrying out experiments is of great value and importance to humanity,” he added.
