Chang'e 6 returns first samples from the Moon's far side

On the afternoon of 25 June 2024, a scorched capsule drifted down under parachute onto the grasslands of Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia, landing at 2:07 p.m. Beijing time. Recovery teams racing toward it knew what no generation before them could claim: sealed inside was material from the side of the Moon that never faces Earth. For six decades, every gram of lunar sample returned by the United States, the Soviet Union and China itself had come from the near side. The far side, geologically alien and permanently hidden, had never given anything back. Until now.

The 53-day mission was a relay ballet conducted out of Earth's direct radio sight. Launched on 3 May 2024 aboard a Long March 5 from Wenchang, the four-module stack reached the Moon and, on 2 June Beijing time, set its lander down in the southern Apollo basin, inside the South Pole-Aitken basin, the oldest and deepest impact scar on the Moon. Every command flowed through the Queqiao-2 relay satellite. In about two days of work, a scoop and a drill gathered 1,935.3 grams of regolith, a mini rover drove off to photograph the lander, and a Chinese flag woven from basalt fiber unfurled above the gray plain.

Then came the hardest part. On 4 June the ascender lit its engine and rose from the far side, the first rocket launch in history from that hemisphere, performed autonomously. Two days later it executed a robotic rendezvous and docking with the orbiter waiting overhead and transferred its cargo to the return module. After the trans-Earth cruise, the capsule skipped off the atmosphere to shed velocity and landed precisely on target. The China National Space Administration declared the mission a complete success, and President Xi Jinping sent his congratulations to the team the same day.

The samples went to Beijing under glove-box quarantine, and the discoveries came quickly. The basalts proved the far side was volcanically active around 2.8 billion years ago, and the fragments carried hints of a drier, differently magnetized interior than the near side, sharpening one of lunar science's oldest puzzles: why the Moon's two faces are so unlike each other. Riding along were France's DORN radon detector and ESA's Swedish-built NILS ion sensor, the first French and ESA instruments ever to operate on the lunar surface.