China says it has successfully recovered a spacecraft that went around the moon then returned in a trial run for the country's first unmanned mission to the lunar surface and back.
The 8-day flight was seen as a test of the technology China will employ in a lunar sample collection and return mission set for 2017.
The lunar Chang'e 5-T1 craft returned to a landing on Earth at about 6 p.m. EDT Friday.
It had launched Oct. 23 on a Long March 3C rocket, making a fly-by of the moon then swinging around it for its return voyage that saw it enter the Earth's atmosphere at around 25,000 mph, landing successfully in China's northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
During its flight to the moon and back the spacecraft covered more than 520,000 miles.
China's moon exploration efforts began in 2007 when it launched the Chang'e 1 lunar orbiter, with another orbiter following in 2010.
In 2013, the Chang'e 3 mission landed a six-wheeled Chinese rover dubbed "Yutu" or "Jade Rabbit" on the moon.
It was the first successful "soft landing" mission on the moon by any country in almost 40 years.
If China's upcoming intended lunar sample mission Change'e 5 is a success, is will become just the third country -- following the United States and Russia -- to retrieve material from the moon and return it to Earth.
"Chang'e" is the name of a moon goddess of Chinese mythology.
Chinese space officials have also been hinting at a possible manned moon mission.
In a space race reminiscent of the competition between the U.S. and Russia in past decades, China has been locked in a space race with regional rival India in the past few years.
India stole a march on China's space efforts when it successfully put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars in September, an accomplishment China had attempted but failed at.
"The success of our space program is a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation," India's Prime Minister Narenda Modi said at the time.
China, for now, seems content to focus missions to the Moon.
Chang'e 5 "gathered a lot of experimental data and laid a solid foundation for future missions," said Wu Yanhua, deputy head of China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.
