Chang'e 5

Chang'e 5 (Chinese: 嫦娥五号; pinyin: Cháng'é wǔhào) was the fifth lunar exploration mission in the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program of CNSA, and China's first lunar sample-return mission. The spacecraft pair launched on 23 November 2020, atop a Long March 5 rocket from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, landed on the Moon on 1 December, collected ~1731 g (61.1 oz) of lunar samples (including from a core ~1 m deep), and returned to the Earth on 16 December. Like its predecessors, the spacecraft is named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang'e. Chang'e 5 was the first lunar sample return since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 in 1976. China became the third country to achieve this, after the US (Apollo 11) and USSR (Luna 16). The mission used four component modules, a Lander/Ascender pair and an Orbiter/Returner pair. The Ascender conducted the first ever robotic lunar orbit docking, with the Orbiter/Returner, and the eighth lunar orbit docking overall, following seven under the US Apollo program. Chang'e 5-T1, launched in 2014, verified the return capsule and lunar orbit rendezvous technologies. CNSA conducted the similar Chang'e 6 mission in 2024, sampling the far side of the Moon. The lunar samples led Chinese scientists to discover Changesite-(Y) and two structures of the titanium compound Ti2O, the sixth, seventh, and eighth minerals discovered on the Moon. China also provided open access to the samples for a consortium of scientists from Australia, US, UK, and Sweden, hailed as a science diplomacy success.