http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/1172

Quick work! LRO views CE5.

Phil

An update to my yesterday's "comic book" map of the landing with some corrections. Coordinates are from LRO Quickmap position, no yet updated to values derived from new LROC image.

Close-up of the sampling arm from the "second panorama".

As it is equipped with two different digging heads (in case of hitting a substrate of various degrees of hardness), I think that both of them have been tried. So perhaps two different types can be distinguished among the six trenches in the pictures (?)

Thanks, Phil. That paper will be helpful. China is advancing the exploration or the Moon with their lander missions. They may well be the science leaders in this century.
This sample-return strategy is a brilliant innovation to confirm what the remote sensing suggests. It will be interesting to see what the analyses of this sample show.

--Bill

Marcin600: "As it is equipped with two different digging heads (in case of hitting a substrate of various degrees of hardness), I think that both of them have been tried. So perhaps two different types can be distinguished among the six trenches in the pictures (?) "

In my composite of sampling events, I think '1' is the rotating sampler trench and the other markings are from the shovel-type scoop. but looking closely there seem to be other rotating sampler trenches among the scoop trenches... I'm not being very clear but I hope you get what I mean.

Phil

Got it, Phil. Thanks for the clarification.
Unfortunately, I don't have such a "trained eye" as you to notice these additional rotating sampler trenches among the scoop trenches

I haven't noticed this before, but in this image (from here) you can see lunar soil samples on the "shovel":

The flag "planted" on the Moon by Chang'e 5 is, as it appears to closer scrutiny of photo, a little "pop-up" device.
An L-shaped support holds a semi-rigid flag.

Animation on this post shows how it works, complete with shaky reverberations.

CGTN news story - raising the flag

Looking at the landing sites of the Chang'e missions it struck me they're all in an area close to the center of a triangle defined by three small craters...

I know there are maaany craters on the Moon but ... could this be a characteristic of the landing algorithm?
Fernando

I lurk more than I post, but I wanted to congratulate everyone here on some of the excellent sleuthing and reporting on this mission - it's been very illuminating!

I wanted to add something that was raised by a rebuttal video to a conspiracy theorist about the mission. The original claim was pointless and irrelevant, but the rebuttal pointed out the movement of some of the rocks during the landing sequence as they are disturbed by the descent engine. I did a quick overlay animation from a couple of the available frames to show the surface disturbance - apologies if anyone else has already mentioned it!

Chang'e 5 lunar orbit docking in progress, according to China space watcher "Rocket Gyan".

Andrew Jones reports success!

Phil

Fantastic result! The first lunar lift-off in 44 years, followed by the first-ever automatic (uncrewed) docking beyond Earth orbit.
The last docking in lunar orbit was 48 years ago this month, during Apollo 17, but that was between two manned craft.
All kudos to China! Surely the next steps homewards will be a little easier...

And the lunar samples have been transferred to the Earth return vehicle...

Xinhua docking report

And from a related story in Kenny's Flag Raising link:

The Docking

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-12-06/China...jEpq/index.html