A Chinese spacecraft returned to Earth on Thursday with its precious cargo of lunar rocks – the first batch of moon samples since the Soviet Luna 24 mission in 1976.

The capsule of the Chang’e 5 probe landed just before 2 a.m. in the Siziwang district of the Inner Mongolia region, according to the China National Space Administration.

Much to the amusement of viewers, footage run by state broadcaster CCTV showed a furry white animal — possibly a fox or rodent — running in front of the capsule as it lay on the ground.

The capsule had earlier separated from its orbiter module and performed a bounce off Earth’s atmosphere to reduce its speed before floating to the ground on parachutes.

After the recovery, the capsule and the sample were flown to the space program’s campus in Beijing to begin the process of disassembly and analysis, officials said.

The deputy head of the space agency said China will share data and samples on the basis of international conventions — but added that US restrictions on cooperation might prevent it from getting any, Reuters reported.

“In accordance with international cooperation conventions and multilateral and bilateral cooperation pacts, we will issue rules on managing the moon samples and data,” said Wu Yanhua.

“We will share with the relevant countries and scientists overseas, and some of them may be given as national gifts in accordance with international practices,” he said.

When asked if the US, which limits NASA from directly cooperating with China, would also receive samples, Wu called the restrictions “unfortunate.”

“The Chinese government is willing to share lunar samples with like-minded institutions and scientists from various countries,” he said. “To be able to cooperate or not depends on US policy.”

The plan was to collect 4.41 pounds of rocks and soil from the moon, but China has not disclosed the amount of samples it has collected.

“We will announce this soon,” Hu Hao, chief designer of the third phase of China’s lunar exploration program, told Reuters on the sidelines of the briefing. “We have not taken them out (of the probe) yet.”

The mission achieved new firsts for the lunar exploration program in collecting samples, launching a vehicle from the lunar surface and docking it with the capsule to return the samples to Earth, the space agency said.

“As our nation’s mostly complex and technically groundbreaking space mission, Chang’e 5 has achieved multiple technical breakthroughs … and represents a landmark achievement,” it said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in a statement read out at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, called the mission a major achievement that marked a great step forward for the country’s space industry.

Xi expressed hope that mission participants would continue to contribute toward building China into a major space power, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said.

The newly obtained rocks are believed to be billions of years younger than those collected earlier by astronauts in the US Apollo missions and by the former Soviet Union.

They come from a part of the moon known as the Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, near a site called the Mons Rumker, which is believed to have been volcanic during ancient times.

As with the 842 pounds of lunar samples brought back by the Americans from 1969 to 1972, they will be analyzed for age and composition.

Their age will help fill in a gap in knowledge about the history of the moon between roughly 1 billion and three billion years ago, Brad Jolliff, director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Associated Press.

They may also provide clues as to the availability of economically useful resources on the moon such as concentrated hydrogen and oxygen, he said.

“These samples will be a treasure trove!” Jolliff wrote in email. “My hat is off to our Chinese colleagues for pulling off a very difficult mission; the science that will flow from analysis of the returned samples will be a legacy that will last for many, many years, and hopefully will involve the international community of scientists.”

With Post wires