An unmanned Chinese spacecraft carrying rocks and soil from the Moon returned safely to Earth early Thursday in the first mission in four decades to collect lunar samples, the Xinhua news agency said.

The capsule carrying the samples collected by the Chang'e-5 space probe landed in northern China's Inner Mongolia region, Xinhua said, quoting the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

The agency's director, Zhang Kejian, declared the mission a success, Xinhua said.

With this mission, China became only the third country to have retrieved samples from the Moon, following the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s.

Beijing is looking to catch up with Washington and Moscow after taking decades to match its rivals' achievements and has poured billions into its military-run space programme.

Chang'e-5, named after a mythical Chinese Moon goddess, landed on the Moon on December 1.

Using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) modeled chemical processes in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

Barchans are crescent-shaped sand dunes whose two horns face in the direction of the fluid flow. They appear in different environments, such as inside water pipes or on river beds, where they take the form of ten-centimeter ripples, and deserts, where they can exceed 100 meters, and the surface of Mars, where they can be a kilometer in length or more.