with Chang'e 5, China became the third country to return samples from the Moon after the United States and the Soviet Union. The Chang'e 5 mission consisted of four parts:

The main objective of NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite was to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed crater. The LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009 and entered