China to lend moon rocks to NASA-funded US universities

SHANGHAI (Reuters) -China's national space agency announced on Thursday it would let scientists from the U.S. and allied countries analyse rocks it retrieved from the moon, Beijing's latest move to increase the international influence of its lunar exploration programme. 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. 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.