BEIJING, May 3 : China’s Long March-5 Y8 carrier rocket has successfully launched the Chang’e-6 lunar probe into the Earth-Moon transit orbit, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Friday.
Earlier in the day, a Sputnik correspondent reported that the Chinese carrier rocket Long March-5 Y8 with the Chang’e-6 lunar probe was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island. The launch took place as scheduled at 5:27 p.m. local time (09:27 GMT).
“The probe precisely entered the Earth-Moon transit orbit. The launch is considered successful,” the space administration said in a statement.
The entire mission, which is expected to return about 2 kilogrammes (4.4 pounds) of soil samples to Earth, will take 53 days, according to the timeline released earlier on Friday by the CNSA.
Chang’e-6 consists of an orbital module, a reentry vehicle, a descent vehicle, and a launch module. The probe is equipped with payloads, including a landing camera, a panoramic camera, a mineral spectral analysis instrument, and a lunar soil structure analysis device.
The lunar probe is carrying international payloads, including the French detector DORN for measuring the concentration of radon gas and its decay products on the surface of the Earth’s natural satellite, the European Space Agency’s NILS negative ion analyzer, Italy’s laser corner reflector, and Pakistan’s ICUBE-Q satellite. (UNI)
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