COURT CAI YANG / XINHUA
A Long March-5 rocket carrying the Tianwen-1 Mars probe lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern China’s Hainan Province on Thursday.
BEIJING – China presented its ambitious project to Mars on Thursday in an ambitious attempt to register in the United States to effectively land a spacecraft on the red planet.
Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Hainan Island, a resort province off the south coast of the mainland, state media said.
Livestreams showed a successful liftoff, with rockets blazing orange and the spacecraft heading upward across clear blue skies. Hundreds of space enthusiasts cried out excitedly on a beach across the bay from the launch site.
It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the U.S. is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., next week.
China’s tandem spacecraft — with both an orbiter and a rover — will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “quest for heavenly truth,” will look for underground water, if it’s present, as well as evidence of possible ancient life.
This isn’t China’s first attempt at Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth’s orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere.
This time, China is going on its own. It’s also fast, launching an orbiter and a rover in the same spinning project.
China’s secret area program has grown in recent decades. Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003 and last year Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft of any country to land on the other aspect of the Moon.
Conquering Mars would put China in an elite club.
“There’s a lot to play on,” said Dean Cheng, an expert in Chinese aerospace systems at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the United States has controlled the landing of a spacecraft on Martian soil, eight times since 1976. NASA’s InSight and Curiosity rovers are still operating today. Six spacecraft are exploring Mars from orbit: 3 Americans, two Europeans and one Indian.
Unlike the other two Mars missions introduced this month, China has strictly controlled data about the program, even withholding any calls for its rover. National security issues have led the United States to restrict cooperation between NASA and China’s program.
In an article previously published this month in Nature Astronomy, mission chief engineer Wan Weixing said Tianwen-1 would go into orbit around Mars in February and look for a landing site on Utopia Planitia, a plain where NASA has detected imaginable evidence of underground ice. Wan died in May of cancer.
Landing would be attempted in April or May, according to the article. If all goes well, the solar rover the size of a 240 kilogram (530 lb) golf cart runs for about 3 months and the orbiter for two years.
Although small compared to the perseverance of 1,025 kilograms (2,260 pounds) of the length of an American car, it is almost twice as large as the two rovers China sent to the moon in 2013 and 2019. Perseverance lasts at least two years. . Training
This Mars launch season, which takes up position every 26 months when Earth and Mars are closer, is busy.
The Amal spacecraft, or Hope, which will be in orbit around Mars but will land, is the first interplanetary project in the Arab world. NASA’s Perseverance rover is as follows.
“At no other time in our history have we noticed anything that’s happening with those 3 exclusive missions to Mars. Each is a marvel of science and engineering,” Space Foundation executive director Thomas Zelibor said at an online roundtable. Week.
China’s direction to Mars hit some punches: a Long Mars-5 rocket, nicknamed “Fat 5” due to its bulky shape, can be unveiled this year. The coronavirus pandemic has forced scientists to paint from home. In March, when the tools were to be transported from Beijing to Shanghai, 3 team members drove 12 hours to deliver them.
As China joins the United States, Russia, and Europe in creating a global satellite navigation system, experts say it is trying to outdo the U.S. In the exploration of the area.
Instead, Cheng, of the Heritage Foundation, said China in a “slow race” with Japan and India to identify itself as the strength of the Asia area.
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