Later this year, China will launch a robotic spacecraft to the Moon and back. We have known about this mission for some time, and we know roughly what the mission hopes to achieve. A bell-shaped re-entry capsule will be carried by a boxy spacecraft out to the Moon, and it will then return for a soft landing on Earth.
This is intended as a test of technology to be used on a future Chinese mission to return rock samples from the Moon. That's China's official explanation for the mission, and it seems right.
This analyst also suspects that China is also testing technology for a future Chinese astronaut launch to the Moon. The re-entry capsule is a scale replica of the capsule used on China's Shenzhou astronaut spacecraft.
China has not released a lot of information on the mission, and has not even revealed any diagrams or photographs of the entire spacecraft. We have seen the re-entry module in photographs, but little else.
China has stated that the main spacecraft will be based on the Chang'e lunar orbiter. With this in mind, this analyst previously created a simple diagram of the probable design of the entire spacecraft. The capsule fits neatly atop the boxy Chang'e bus.
We believed that China would fly this mission in a free-return trajectory to the Moon. This meant that the spacecraft would fly around the far side of the Moon and use the Moon's gravity to sling it back to Earth.
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