It turned out that during Vladimir Putin's visit to China in February 2022, the Chinese side handed over to Russia for study 1.5 grams of regolith - lunar soil, obtained in December 2020 by the Chang'e-5 mission. And in March of this year, when the chairman of the PRC visited Moscow, the Chinese delegation was given the same amount of regolith, but older - collected by the Soviet mission Luna-16 in 1970. That's how politics goes hand in hand with science.

Let's recall, the Luna-16 mission ended on September 24, 1970, when the return module of the automatic interplanetary station made a landing in the Kazakh SSR. For the first time in the world, an automatic station delivered samples of lunar soil to Earth - its mass was 101 grams. By chemical composition, the regolith represents a crushed rock of a basaltic type.