Orbiter.jpg (Photo : Reuters)
Earth made another successful mission to the Moon.
On Saturday, the State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense announced the successful return of a service module attached to an unmanned Chinese lunar orbiter from its Earth-to-Moon trip.
The service module, a Chang'e-5 T1 named "Xiaofei," has made it to the second Lagrange Point (L2).
As of Nov. 28, Friday, Xiaofei has been flying in space for almost a month. As the experiment was reported to be going smoothly, the space trip reached 63,000 kilometers away from the Moon and 421,000 kilometers back to the Earth.
It was on Nov. 1 when the service module came back on Earth after going around for eight days in space. It detached from China's lunar orbiter on Oct. 24.
It took four decades before the world made another successful mission to the Moon since 1970. China was the third to do so, following the Soviet Union and the United States.
China's lunar mission managed to make two orbital transfers, re-entering the elliptical orbit, with a perigee of 600 kilometers and an apogee of 540,000 kilometers.
Xiaofei accomplished two more orbital transfers on Nov. 23 during the flight, and traversed the pre-set Earth-to-Moon orbit. The service module took an orbit maneuver to the L2 point and reached the perilune.
