“It’s an achievement,” rejoices astrophysicist Sylvestre Maurice

The planetary exploration specialist welcomed the success of the Chinese Chang’e-6 mission, which brought back to Earth samples collected on the far side of the Moon.

“It’s an achievement. It’s never been easy to go to the Moon, even less so when it comes to the far side”rejoices this Tuesday on franceinfo Sylvestre Maurice, astrophysicist, specialist in planetary exploration and member of the Chang’e-6 team. This Tuesday, China brought back to Earth the first samples in history collected on the hidden side of the Moon. The Chang’e-6 probe returned to Earth, marking the “complete success” of the mission, according to the Chinese space agency.

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SM: “Yes, it’s an achievement. It’s never been easy to go to the Moon, even less so when it comes to its hidden side. This is the sixth mission [de la Chine] and this is the sixth feat. It’s impressive. When you are face down, you need a relay satellite, you need to communicate. But it’s more than that, it’s a mission where 11 critical events all had to come together, and they did it to the minute. They have combined in this mission all that is most difficult in extraterrestrial exploration. It’s a great success in every way. China is a new player, which appeared around twenty years ago and which is moving at such speed, which is linking all these events, we are learning to work with them.”

Remind us what this hidden side of the Moon is.

“We must understand that the Moon rotates on itself at the same speed as it rotates around the Earth, and therefore it always shows us the same face, which we call the visible face. The face that we do not never seen, we know little about it. All the samples we had before all came from the visible side. We have extraordinary luck, we are going to have samples from a completely new place on the Moon. […] We will find out if everything we saw on the visible side finds its echo on the hidden side and then go further by perhaps exploring the mantle of the Moon, finally, for the first time.”

On board this probe, there was a French device, wasn’t there?

“Yes exactly. There was an instrument called “Dorn”. This is the first time that France has placed an instrument that is said to be active, which operated on the surface of the Moon and the Chinese were the carriers of this instrument on the mission The French team was there at takeoff, at landing, in the control room, while the Chinese took these pieces of the moon, to activate this instrument and collect this impressive data.