Chang'e 5
Chang'e 5 was a Chinese mission that brought back 1.73 kilograms of young lunar rock and soil in 2020.
Chang'e 5 was a Chinese robotic mission named after the Moon goddess of Chinese legend. Launched in November 2020, it landed in the Oceanus Procellarum region, near Mons Rümker, collected 1,731 grams of lunar material by scooping and drilling, and returned it to Inner Mongolia on 16 December 2020. It was the first lunar sample return since the Soviet Luna 24 in 1976.
The landing site was chosen because crater counts suggested its lavas were unusually young. Laboratory dating of the basalts gave an age of about 2.0 billion years, much younger than the Apollo basalts. This showed that the Moon stayed volcanically active far longer than many scientists expected and gave a valuable calibration point for crater-counting ages across the Solar System.
The samples also included a new mineral, a phosphate named changesite-(Y), and water-bearing glass beads. They add a new site to the six Apollo and three Luna landing sites.
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