China’s Chang’e-6 lunar probe successfully enters the CNSA transit orbit between Earth and the moon

BEIJING, May 3: China’s Long March-5 Y8 launch vehicle 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 launch vehicle Long March-5 Y8 carrying 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 PM local time (09:27 GMT).

“The probe ended up exactly in 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 kilograms of soil samples to Earth, will last 53 days, according to the timeline released by the CNSA earlier on Friday.

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 analyzer.

The lunar probe carries international payloads, including the French detector DORN for measuring the concentration of radon gas and its decay products on the surface of Earth’s natural satellite, the European Space Agency’s NILS negative ion analyzer, the Italian laser angle reflector and the Pakistani ICUBE. -Q satellite. (UNI)