On 25 June, Li Chunlai watched eagerly as a capsule carrying the first pieces of the far side of the Moon landed on Earth. “Sample, I finally got you,” he thought, as if speaking to an adversary he had spent years trying to outwit.
That moment capped decades of hard work for Li, deputy chief designer for China’s Chang’e-6 mission, which blasted off to the Moon on 3 May. The 3,200-kilogram lander — about as heavy as a pickup truck — spent two days drilling and scooping material on the lunar surface before sending the samples back to Earth.
Li was central to deciding where on the Moon the spacecraft would land and was among the first to analyse the rocks it ferried back. He and his team of 70 or so staff members oversee the data collected during China’s space missions, and that includes storing and distributing samples. “What he is really good at, is coordination,” says James Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has collaborated extensively with Li.
When he was a young researcher studying geology and cosmic chemistry, Li says he never imagined holding samples from the Moon. But he has been involved in determining the science objectives of China’s lunar exploration programme since its inception, when Chang’e-1 was sent to orbit the Moon in 2007. This is Li’s second sample-return mission for the China National Space Administration. He had a similar role during the Chang’e-5 mission, which brought back soil and rock from the Moon’s near side.
The latest shipment, containing almost two kilograms of lunar material from the hemisphere hidden from Earth’s view, could unravel many mysteries about the Moon’s early evolution, and the planets beyond, say researchers.
“We have been dreaming of having samples from the far side of the Moon,” says Patrick Pinet, a planetary scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France.
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