An unmanned Chinese spacecraft carrying rocks and soil from the Moon returned safely to Earth early Thursday within the first mission in four decades to gather lunar samples, the Xinhua wire service said.
The return module of the guided-missile called Chang'e-5 landed in northern China's Inner Mongolia region, Xinhua said, quoting the China National Space Administration.
Beijing is looking to catch up with the US and Russia after taking decades to match its rivals' achievements and has poured billions into its military-run space program.
The spacecraft, named after a mythical Chinese Moon goddess, landed on the laze on December 1 and commenced its return voyage two days later. While on the Moon it raised the Chinese flag, China's space agency has said.
Scientists hope the samples will help them study the Moon's origins, formation, and volcanic activity on its surface.
With this mission, China became only the third country to own retrieved samples from the Moon, following us and therefore the land within the 1960s and 1970s.
This was the primary such attempt since the Soviet Union's Luna 24 mission in 1976.
The spacecraft's mission was to gather two kilograms (4.5 pounds) of fabric in a neighborhood referred to as Oceanus Procellarum – or "Ocean of Storms" – an enormous, previously unexplored lava plain, in line with the science journal Nature.
Under President Xi Jinping, plans for China's "space dream", as he calls it, are put into overdrive.
China hopes to possess a crewed space platform by 2022 and eventually send humans to the Moon.
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