Chang'e 5's reentry capsule lands with moon samples

A Chinese national flag is planted near the Chang'e 5 reentry capsule, which landed in Inner Mongolia autonomous region on early Thursday. [PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY]

China's most sophisticated and challenging space adventure – the Chang'e 5 robotic lunar mission – ended successfully early Thursday morning with its load of rocks and dust from the moon landing on the grasslands in northern China.

The China National Space Administration said in a statement that Chang'e 5's reentry capsule touched down on its preset landing site in Siziwang banner of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region at 1:59 am.

The recovery team will make initial processing of the capsule and then use a plane to transport it to Beijing where it will be opened for technicians to remove the container holding lunar samples, the administration said.

The reentry and landing started around 1 am when mission controllers uploaded high-accuracy navigation data to the orbiter-reentry capsule combination that was traveling around the Earth.

The capsule then separated from the orbiter about 5,000 kilometers above the southern Atlantic Ocean and began to descend toward Earth. It entered the atmosphere at the second cosmic velocity, or 11.2 kilometers per second at 1:33 am, and soon bounced off the atmosphere to further slow down its ultrafast speed that could cause damage to the vehicle. Later, the craft reentered the atmosphere at a much slower speed of about 7.9 km per second, also known as the first cosmic velocity.

When the module was about 10 km above the ground, it released its parachutes and smoothly landed on the snow-covered grasslands. Recovery personnel sent from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center soon came to the landing site in helicopters and off-road vehicles.

The successful landing marked the completion of the historic 23-day Chang'e 5 expedition, the first in more than 40 years, to bring lunar samples back to Earth, also making China the third country to achieve this feat after the United States and the former Soviet Union.