It turned out that during Vladimir Putin's visit to China in February 2022, the Chinese side handed over 1.5 grams of regolith to Russia for study – lunar soil obtained in December 2020 by the Chang'e-5 mission. And in March of this year, when the Chinese President visited Moscow, the Chinese delegation was given the same amount of regolith, but older – collected by the Soviet Luna-16 mission in 1970. This is how politics goes hand in hand with science.
Let us recall that the Luna-16 mission was completed on September 24, 1970, when the return module of the automatic interplanetary station landed in the Kazakh SSR. For the first time in the world, samples of lunar soil were delivered to Earth by an automatic station – its mass was 101 grams. In terms of chemical composition, regolith is a crushed rock of basalt type.
