Paul VoosenChina’s Chang’e-5 mission made a triumphant return around 1 p.m. EST today, landing in the middle of the night on the dark frozen plains of Inner Mongolia, Chinese state media reported.
The capsule’s return marks the first time China has collected rocks from the Moon—and the first time any nation has accomplished the feat since 1976.The 3-week-long mission was the most complicated in the history of China’s robotic space exploration program, involving a lunar landing, furious scooping and drilling of up to 2 kilograms of grit, and then an ascent and rendezvous with an orbiter, which carried the samples back to Earth.