China to lend moon rocks to NASA-funded U.S. universities

China’s national space agency said it would let scientists from the U.S. and allied countries analyze rocks it retrieved from the moon.

SHANGHAI — China’s national space agency said Thursday that it would let scientists from the U.S. and allied countries analyze rocks it retrieved from the moon, Beijing’s latest move to increase the international influence of its lunar exploration program.

The announcement highlights how U.S.-China cooperation in some areas like space has not completely ended, despite tensions between the two countries over geopolitics and tariffs.

Two U.S. universities that receive NASA funding, Brown University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, are among the seven institutions that have been allowed to borrow lunar samples China retrieved from the moon in 2020.

The remaining authorized institutions are from Japan, France, Germany, Britain and Pakistan.

With its uncrewed Chang’e-5 mission in 2020 China became only the third country to collect rocks from the lunar surface, joining the Soviet Union and the United States, which last went to the moon and retrieved samples in 1972.

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/china-lend-moon-rocks-nasa-funded-us-universities-rcna202945

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