Chinese space engineers made small but deliberate changes to last year’s historic sample retrieval mission to the far side of the moon to avoid political friction in the South China Sea, according to a new paper.
The Chang’e-6 spacecraft left the Wenchang spaceport on Hainan Island on board a Long March-5 rocket in May 2024, returning to Earth the following month with the world’s first lunar samples from the moon’s hidden side.
According to the paper published last month by China’s Journal of…
