China launches lunar exploration mission Chang’e 5

The Chinese National Space Administration triumphantly launched on Monday unmanned spacecraft Chang’e 5 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province to the moon. Its mission is to assemble drilled samples of crater rocks that will be brought back to Earth for additional analysis.

Chinese scientists plan to test certain key-theories and utilise their findings to elaborate on the principles concerning the origin of the inner solar system’s rocky planets. The aim is to identify how a crater’s density corresponds to a planet’s age, through the improvement of crater-density age models of the surfaces of Moon, Mars, Mercury, and Venus.