A Chinese Cow Jumped Over The Moon...
...but the real prize is to land it back at Earth without burning up, right? :rofl:
You might be surprised to know that the Chinese are launching a spacecraft to the Moon
today. Yes, today. And not only it will go around the Moon, it will come back to Earth.
And it certainly came almost out of the blue (I mean, no-one knew how it actually looks like until yesterday!), but the Chinese is certainly following their plans for lunar exploration. Remember Chang'e 5, the Chinese lunar sample return mission currently in development for flight in 2018? That's their ultimate prize for a long time since the plans for the Chang'e 1/2 lunar orbiters and the Chang'e 3/4 lunar landers were yet to be frozen around 8 years ago.
Now with the problems for landing on the Moon and surface exploration have been mainly cleared by Chang'e 3 since late last year, the next obvious question is how to come back from the Moon. But there's one big question in there - how do you design a return capsule that could withstand re-entry into the atmosphere at almost Earth escape velocity, i.e. over 11 km/s? The Americans have done it since Apollo and the Russians have too since the Zond series, but since the 1960s not many other entities have followed their footsteps (the Japanese did it once, and I don't think the Europeans ever tried this on Earth's atmosphere). The Chinese certainly hasn't.
That is, until now. To demonstrate re-entry technologies required to return such a sample-carrying capsule back from the Moon, they have quickly assembled a mission to carry a prototype of the capsule on a high Earth orbit that will take it around the Moon and back. Using a spacecraft borrowed from the designs of the Chang'e 1/2 lunar orbiters (which in turn was designed on a tried and true communication satellite bus) with the capsule sticked on to it, the Chang'e 5-T1 spacecraft is born.
Today at 17:59 UTC, it will lift off from China's main beyond-Earth-orbit-spaceport, the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. A Long March 3C rocket will push it directly into a lunar transfer orbit where it will cross behind the Moon early on October 28. I don't know if it will need correction burns to put it back, but another 4 days later it will head directly into Earth's atmosphere (after the capsule separates from the main spacecraft) by doing a skip re-entry targeting the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the same place where Shenzhou missions end. The maximum velocity the capsule will endure, more than 11 kilometers per second, is quite a bit higher than both Orion EFT-1 and the European IXV will encounter over the next 2 months!
Good luck!
