China's Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission delayed by Long March 5 rocket failure, official confirms
by
Andrew Jones Sep 25, 2017 13:41
The Long March 5 (Y2) rocket lifts off from Wenchang at 19:23:23 local time on July 2, 2017. CNS
China’s attempt to return the first samples from the Moon in over forty years, originally set for late November, is being delayed following the failure of the huge Long March 5 rocket in July, a top official has confirmed.
Tian Yulong, secretary-general of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), speaking at a press conference at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia on Monday, confirmed the delay.
Mr Tian said the investigation into the
July 2 failure of the second Long March 5 rocket, which is needed to the get the 8.2 tonne
Chang'e-5 probe to the Moon's surface, is underway, with the details possibly ready by the end of the year.
SpaceNews.com senior writer tweets live from IAC 2017 in Adelaide. Jeff Foust
Expected delay, new schedule not known
The delay to Chang'e-5 is no surprise, but it is the first public statement from a top official from the Chinese space programme.
This reporter understands that the Chinese side has already informed the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), which is to
provide ground support for the launch and landing segments of the Chang'e-5 mission, that the mission will not proceed in November.
With the rocketry issues still unclear, so is any new timeline. There have been vague suggestions from scientists in China close to the mission that the mission may launch before or after early 2019.
The Long March 5 Y2 failure to reach orbit, believed preliminarily to stem from a first-stage issue, followed a
successful-yet-dramatic and far from perfect maiden flight in November 2016, suggesting that time will be needed before return to flight is attempted.
China's largest rocket is
crucial to a number of its key space ambitions, including its first interplanetary mission, to
Mars in 2020, while the Long March 5B variant will be used to launch the
20 tonne modules for the future
Chinese Space Station to low Earth orbit.
The third Long March 5, which was originally planned to launch Chang'e-5 in late November, was already being manufactured in Tianjin at the time of the failure, in preparation for shipping in September. Meanwhile the probe was ready to be shipped to the launch centre at Wenchang on the island province of Hainan in August, were Chang'e-5 on schedule.
Long March 5 (Y3) components in Tianjin earlier in 2017. CASC
It is expected now that the Long March 5 (Y3) will instead be carrying a much less valuable or prestigious payload, possibly a second experimental large DFH-5 satellite bus, the first of which,
Shijian-18, was lost in the July 2 failure.
The Yuanwang-21 and 22 cargo vessels designed to transport the components of the heavy-lift launch vehicle from the port city of Tianjin in the north to Wenchang in the south meanwhile remain docked in Eastern China.
Chang'e-5 probe otherwise ready
The Chang'e-5 mission is the third and final step of the robotic Chinese Lunar Exploration Project (CLEP), approved in the early 2000s, which set out to orbit, land and rove on, and finally return samples from the Moon, and sets the stage for more ambitious future missions.
Some estimates put the mission cost at around 20bn yuan, or US$3bn, and the complex, four-stage spacecraft and its mission profile would also implicitly prove useful for an
expanded robotic lunar project, eventual human landings and a Mars sample return in the late 2020s.
Scientists working on China's Chang'e-5 reentry vehicle, right, with lander and ascent vehicles in the background.
While the issues with the launch vehicle are being isolated and addressed, the Chang'e-5 probe itself is ready to go.
Sun Weigang, chief engineer at the the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), said in a keynote session on Chang'e-5 at the Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX 2017) in June that a range of tests, including simulated launch, landing, take-off and sampling, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the mission plan.
There have also been integrated tests with a non-flight model of the Long March 5 in Wenchang in 2016.The last lunar sample return mission, the Soviet Union’s Luna 24, saw the ascent stage returned directly to Earth, but China has decided that the Chang'e-5 mission will include a lunar orbit rendezvous similar to that used to facilitate the US Apollo lunar landings.
The 8.2 metric ton Chang'e-5 spacecraft requires the power of Long March 5 heavy-lift launch vehicles, and consists of a lander, a return vehicle, a service module and an ascent unit, the latter two of which will rendezvous in orbit after the lander has loaded the ascent unit with samples. The return vehicle will then receive the samples before separating from the service module close to Earth and performing a
skip reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
This complexity
hints that China will be looking to use aspects of the Chang’e-5 mission as experience for future grand missions, such as human lunar landings and a Mars sample return mission.
Framegrab from a video demonstrating the 2017 Chinese Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission. Youku/Framegrab
The precise final target has not been revealed, but it is known that the Chang'e-5 lander will set down
near Mons Rümker in Oceanus Procellarum, a large area of lunar mare in the northwest region of the Moon.
Further background on
this and other selections has been laid out by Phil Stooke for the Planetary Society.
Bradley Jolliff, the Scott Rudolph Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St Louis, said in a presentation last week at the 3rd Beijing International Forum on Lunar and Deep Space Exploration, that one potential landing site, "P58", would allow Chang'e-5 to sample much younger basalts (potentially around 1.33 billion years old) than those returned by the United States' Apollo missions (3 to 4 billion years old), and offer insights into volcanism in the region and the thermal evolution of the Moon.
Far side mission changes?
It is unclear how the Chang'e-4 mission, which if successful would be the first landing on the far side of the Moon, will be affected.
The mission would see the backup to China's 2013 Chang'e-3 lander and rover attempt to land in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the lunar far side, which is never visible to the Earth due to tidal locking.
It involves sending a relay satellite to the second Earth-Moon Lagrange Point beyond the Moon some six months earlier to facilitate communications, but neither this nor the lander and rover require the Long March 5.
China's Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission delayed by Long March 5 rocket failure, official confirms | gbtimes.com