October 2021
Russia and China – a new space axis
... programme (see table). China achieved its first lunar landing in 2013, a far side landing in 2019 and a sample return in 2020 (Chang’e 3-5), but had three more lunar spacecraft in preparation (Chang’e 6-8). Russia, by contrast, wanted to resume its...
March 2016
Searching for water in the Solar System
...community for this object has led to the introduction of many different concepts over the past decade: sample return missions, high-resolution geophysical characterisation, surface landers, and geological and chemical mapping. It is expected that the...
April 2020
Is space poised to take another giant leap?
... missions with rovers already accomplished, and a pair of sample return missions planned for the coming year. Taikonauts will follow .... Having been to the lunar surface and returned with rock samples revealing its mineral potential, it was Armstrong’s...
23 December 2015
First new 'ground truth' in 40 years as Chinese rover Yuto presents analysis of moon rocks
... visible from Earth, to reveal that the basalts at the landing site are unlike those returned by the Apollo and Luna sample return missions. Since the termination of these two prominent lunar missions over nearly 40 years ago...
28 January 2019
Oldest Earth rocks found on the Moon
... Moon. The surprising find has been uncovered by an international team of scientists who had been studying a lunar sample returned by the Apollo 14 astronauts from their mission 48 years ago. The 2 gram fragment of rock, which is a possible relic...
16 October 2020
SWRI tests "Clockwork Starfish" for sampling asteroids
... for transport by turning itself entirely inside-out. “While current asteroid sample return missions visit single asteroids and collect samples from one or two locations on their surface, a future mission carrying dozens of micro-sampler landers...
