Free Republic

The small probe, which sat on top of the Chang'e 5 lander, lifted off from Oceanus Procellarum at 10:10 EST Thursday (15:10 GMT/23:10 Beijing time) carrying with it the first fresh lunar samples since 1976. Six minutes later, the ascent spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, marking a huge milestone in the Chang'e 5 mission to return lunar samples to Earth. The ascent vehicle's job now is to meet up with the Chang'e 5 orbiter while still circling the moon, and then transfer its precious cargo to a return capsule for the journey home. That next stage is an extremely challenging rendezvousing...

The roughly 878-metric-ton heavy-lift Long March 5 was vertically transferred from an assembly building to its launch area late Monday Eastern in a process that took around two hours. Launch of the 8.2-metric-ton Chang’e-5 spacecraft from the coastal Wenchang Satellite Launch Center is now expected Nov. 24 local time. State media reports have so far only confirmed the launch will take place in late November. A successful mission would make China only the third country to deliver lunar samples to Earth, after the U.S. Apollo crewed program and Soviet robotic Luna missions of the 1960s and 1970s. The Chang’e-5 landing...

China plans to launch an ambitious asteroid exploration mission and has invited collaborators to put their experiments on the probes, space agency officials said Thursday. The 10-year mission will involve a probe sent to a near-Earth asteroid to collect samples, said Liu Jizhong, head of China's Exploration and Space Engineering Centre. After the sample collection from the 2016 HO3 asteroid, the probe will return to Earth orbit where it will split into two. A capsule carrying the samples will return to Earth's surface, while a separate module will approach and orbit the comet 133P. A similar call was made for...