A panorama returned by the Chang'e-5 lander, showing robotic sampling arm and scoop marks in lunar regolith.
A panorama returned by the Chang'e-5 lander, showing robotic sampling arm and scoop marks in lunar regolith.

NASA currently has no plans to trade any of its Apollo-era lunar samples with those returned by China’s Chang’e-5 mission, although then agency’s chief scientist held out hope for such an exchange in the future.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...