Craft returns home after trip to moon
Print Edition
CHINA yesterday successfully recovered an experimental spacecraft that flew around the moon and back in a test for the country’s first unmanned return flight to the lunar surface.
The eight-day trip marked the first time in almost four decades that a spacecraft has returned to Earth after traveling around the moon. China plans to send a spacecraft to the moon in 2017 and have it return to Earth after collecting soil samples.
If successful, China will become only the third country, after the United States and Russia, to complete such a mission.
The nation’s lunar exploration program has already launched a pair of orbiting probes and last year landed a craft and rover on the moon.
China has also hinted at a possible manned mission to the moon at a future date if officials decide to combine the human spaceflight and lunar exploration programs.
The latest mission was aimed at obtaining experimental data and testing technologies for re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere involving guidance, navigation and control, heat shield design, and trajectory fine-tuning for the future moonlander, Chang’e 5.
The spacecraft returned to Earth using a Soviet-designed method in which it first bounced off the atmosphere in order to slow its entry speed and avoid burning up.
It landed just before dawn in the northern grasslands of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003, becoming the third nation after Russia and the US to achieve manned space travel independently. It has since launched a temporarily crewed space station and conducted a spacewalk.
Alongside the manned and lunar programs, China is developing the Long March 5 heavier-lift rocket needed to launch a more permanent space station to be called Tiangong 2.
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