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China’s Chang’e 5 Mission to Collect First Moon Samples Since 1976

November 27, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Mike Wall November 23, 2020 (space.com)

• On November 23rd, China’s robotic Chang’e 5 mission launched to land on the Moon and retrieve lunar rocks, and bring them back to Earth in mid-December. The last time Moon rocks were brought back to Earth was the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976. Chinese officials have been characteristically vague about the details.

• The Chang’e 5’s will arrive in lunar orbit around November 28th, then send two of its four modules — a lander and an ascent vehicle — to the lunar surface a day or so later. The landing target is the Mons Rumker area of the Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”) volcanic plain. This area has been extensively explored by a number of other missions, including NASA’s Apollo 12 in 1969.

• Over the course of two weeks, the stationary lander will use cameras, ground-penetrating radar, and a spectrometer to study the area. It will collect about 4.4 lbs of lunar material, some of which will be dug from up to 6.5 feet underground. The timeline is tight given that it needs to accomplish its objectives before the sun light turns to shadow in two weeks, as the lander is solar powered.

• The rocks at Mons Rumker were formed 1.2 billion years ago. The 842 lbs of Moon rocks brought home by the Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972 are considerably older, providing a window in the deeper lunar past. Chang’e 5 “will help scientists understand what was happening in the more recent past of the Moon’s history.

• The Chang’e 5 lander will transfer its rock samples to the ascent vehicle, which will launch them to lunar orbit for a meetup with the other two mission elements, a service module and an attached Earth-return capsule. Loaded into the return capsule, the rocks will be brought back to Earth by December 16th or 17th. Rather than relying on strong heat shielding to blast through the atmosphere on re-entry, as the Apollo capsules did, Chang’e 5 will perform a ‘skip reentry,’ bouncing off the atmosphere once to slow down before plummeting to a landing in Inner Mongolia.

• Chang’e 5 is the sixth mission in the Chang’e program of robotic lunar exploration, which is named after a moon goddess in Chinese mythology. China launched the Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 orbiters in 2007 and 2010, respectively, and the Chang’e 3 lander-rover duo touched down on the Moon’s near side in December 2013. The Chang’e 5T1 mission launched a prototype return capsule traveling around the Moon in October 2014, to help prepare for Chang’e 5. And in January 2019, Chang’e 4 became the first mission ever to ace a soft landing on the Moon’s far side. Chang’e 4’s lander and rover are still going strong, as is the Chang’e 3 lander. (The Chang’e 3 rover died after 31 months of work on the lunar surface.)

• Chang’e 5 is part of a recent surge in ‘sample-return missions’. On December 6th, for example, pieces of the asteroid Ryugu collected by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission are scheduled to touch down in Australia. And NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe gathered a hefty sample of the asteroid Bennu last month. That material will return to Earth in September 2023.

The first lunar sample-return mission since the 1970s is underway.

China’s robotic Chang’e 5 mission launched today (Nov. 23) from Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, rising into the sky atop a Long March 5 rocket at about 3:30 p.m. EST (2130 GMT; 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 24 local time in Hainan).

If all goes according to plan, the bold and complex Chang’e 5 will haul pristine moon samples back to Earth in mid-December — something that hasn’t been done since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976.

Chang’e 5’s short mission will be action-packed. The 18,100-lb. (8,200 kilograms) spacecraft will likely arrive in lunar orbit around Nov. 28, then send two of its four modules — a lander and an ascent vehicle — to the lunar surface a day or so later. (Chinese officials have been characteristically vague about Chang’e 5’s details, so timeline information has been pieced together from various sources by China space watchers like Space News’ Andrew Jones, who also provides articles for Space.com.)

The mission will land in the Mons Rumker area of the huge volcanic plain Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”), portions of which have been explored by a number of other surface missions, including NASA’s Apollo 12 in 1969.

The stationary lander will study its environs with cameras, ground-penetrating radar and a spectrometer. But its main job is to snag about 4.4 lbs. (2 kg) of lunar material, some of which will be dug from up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) underground. This work will be done over the course of two weeks, or one lunar day — a firm deadline, given that the Chang’e 5 lander is solar-powered and won’t be able to operate once night falls at its location.

Mons Rumker harbors rocks that formed just 1.2 billion years ago, meaning that Chang’e 5 “will help scientists understand what was happening late in the moon’s history, as well as how Earth and the solar system evolved,” as the nonprofit Planetary Society noted its description of the mission. (The 842 lbs., or 382 kg, of moon rocks brought home by the Apollo astronauts between 1969 and 1972 are considerably older, providing a window in the deeper lunar past.)

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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Showed That Aliens Might Be More Than Science Fiction

July 31, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E51 8-03-19 A Private Tour of Roswell with a UFO Expert Looking for the Truth” on Spreaker.

Article by Brandon Specktor July 20, 2019 (livescience.com)

• On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Four days later, the astronauts were quarantined aboard the USS Hornet for a 21-day isolation period. This was to ensure that no potentially hazardous lunar microbes had hitchhiked back to Earth with them. The NASA scientists found no microbial aliens on the astronauts themselves or in the 50 pounds of lunar rocks they brought back.

• Senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak (pictured above), thinks that the Apollo 11 Moon mission did bring back aliens, in a sense. “Today, about 30 percent of the public thinks the Earth is being visited by aliens in saucers, despite the evidence of that being very poor,” says Shostak. “I think the Moon landing had something to do with that.” Live Science.com recently spoke with Shostak to find out more about how the Moon landing changed the scientific community’s pursuit of aliens and the world’s perception of them.

• LS: What did the Moon landing teach humans about extraterrestrial life? Shostak: Not too much. By 1969, most scientists expected the Moon would be dead. The Moon has no atmosphere, no liquid, and temperatures that range from hundreds of degrees to minus hundreds of degrees. “It’s awful!” But the Apollo missions showed that you could travel from one world to another on a rocket – and maybe aliens could, too. Suddenly, the universe was a little more open.

• LS: In 1969, did scientists think there might be aliens somewhere else in the solar system? Shostak: Mars was the ‘Great Red Hope’ of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. People were very optimistic in 1976 when the Viking landers plopped down onto Mars that there would be life. There wasn’t. These days, scientists will suggest looking at the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, such as Enceladus, where geysers shoot possible microbial material right into space, so you don’t have to land a spacecraft on the surface to find it.

• LS: What did the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) look like around 1969? Shostak: Modern SETI experiments began in 1960 with astronomer Frank Drake and his Project Ozma, where he searched for inhabited planets around two stars using a radio telescope. (After four years of searching, no recognizable signals were detected.) By 1969, SETI research was being conducted informally by people who were working with telescopes in their spare time, looking up the coordinates of nearby stars and hoping to pick up radio waves. It wasn’t really organized until the NASA SETI program began in the 1970’s with a budget of $10 million a year. In 1993, a democratic congressman from Nevada killed the SETI funding, in spite of the fact that the NASA program profited from the public’s fascination with aliens more than from anywhere else.

• [Editor’s Note] Previous articles have established that Seth Shostak and SETI are Deep State assets whose objective is to lull the public into complacency by reassuring them that every planet and heavenly body, besides the Earth, is ‘dead’ and unable to support life beyond possible microbial life. Lately, SETI and Shostak have been shilling for the restoration of Deep State government funding, so they can line their pockets while maintaining the ongoing Deep State cover-up of a teeming extraterrestrial presence on, within, and orbiting our planet.

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on Earth’s moon for the first time in human history. Four days later, they — along with Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins — were locked up on an American battleship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The triumphant astronauts were in quarantine. Per a NASA safety protocol written half a decade earlier, the three lunar visitors were escorted directly from their splashdown site in the central Pacific to a modified trailer aboard the USS Hornet, where a 21-day isolation period began. The objective? To ensure that no potentially hazardous lunar microbes hitchhiked back to Earth with them.

Of course, as NASA quickly confirmed, there were no tiny aliens lurking in the astronauts’ armpits or in the 50 pounds (22 kilograms) of lunar rocks and soil they had collected. But despite this absence of literal extraterrestrial life, the Apollo 11 astronauts still may have succeeded in bringing aliens back to Earth in another way that can still be felt 50 years later.

“Today, about 30 percent of the public thinks the Earth is being visited by aliens in saucers, despite the evidence of that being very poor,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute — a nonprofit research center focused on the search for alien life in the universe — told Live Science. “I think the moon landing had something to do with that.”

Shostak has been searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe for most of his life (and, fittingly, shares a birthday with the Apollo 11 landing). Live Science recently spoke with him to find out more about how the moon landing changed the scientific community’s pursuit of aliens and the world’s perception of them. Highlights of our conversation (lightly edited for clarity) appear below.

LS: What did the moon landing teach humans about extraterrestrial life?

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