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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.
A long March 5 carrier rocket took off clear skies at approximately 12:40 p.m. Hainan Island, southern mainland China. Hundreds of area enthusiasts eagerly shouted on a beach across the bay from the launch site.
“It’s a kind of hope, a kind of strength,” said Li Dapeng, co-founder of the Chinese branch of the Mars Society, a foreign enthusiastic organization. He dressed in a Mars Society T-shirt and was there with his wife, 11-year-old son and 2,000 others on the beach to attend the launch.
Launch commander Zhang Xueyu announced that they applauded in the control room that the rocket was usually flying about forty-five minutes later. “The Mars rover has as it should enter the intended orbit,” he said in brief comments broadcast live on state-owned CCTV.
The China-area company said the rocket carried the ship for 36 minutes before effectively hitting it on the looping path that would take it beyond Earth’s orbit and, in spite of everything, inside Mars’ farthest orbit around the sun.
Mission spokesman Liu Tongjie said at a press conference that the launch is a “key step in China’s march into a more remote space.” He said China’s purpose not to compete with other countries, but to peacefully explore the universe.
It’s time for the flight to Mars this week, after an UAE orbiter takes off on a rocket from Japan on Monday. And the United States intends to launch Perseverance, its most complicated rover to date, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, next week.
“It’s surprising that some other country filed the dossier for Mars,” said Dr Katarina Miljkovic, a planet specialist at Curtin University in Australia, adding that the global is no longer in an area race. “It’s more like this area marathon than we all have to run.”
The Chinese tandem spacecraft, whether with an orbiter and a rover, will take seven months to succeed on Mars, just like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “seek heavenly truth,” will seek groundwater, if present, as well as evidence of an ancient life imaginable.
This is not China’s first attempt on Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian project lost when the spacecraft was unable to leave Earth’s orbit after its liberation from Kazakhstan, and eventually burned into 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 of this,” said Dean Cheng, an expert in Chinese aerospace systems at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
The “brave” launch said Dr. Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The next challenge is that the probe “always works when it reaches Mars and survives access and landing.”
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 curb cooperation between NASA and China’s program.
In an article previously published this month in Nature Astronomy, chief mission 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.
Then, an attempt would be taken to land in April or May, according to the article. If all goes well, the sun travels the length of a 240 kilogram (530 lb) golf cart for about 3 months and the orbiter for two years.
There is uncertainty even after the rover has landed on Mars, Liu Tongjie said. “For example, if there is a sandstorm, you have to replace the way it works to prevent sand from falling on the solar panel, which will make your ability to get energy,” he said.
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 giant 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 orbit Mars and 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 clinical and technical marvel,” Space Foundation CEO Thomas Zelibor said at an online roundtable. this week.
China’s direction to Mars hit some punches: a Long Mars-5 rocket, nicknamed “Fat 5” due to its bulky shape, can be presented before 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 seeking to outperform America’s leadership in exploring the area.
Instead, Cheng, of the Heritage Foundation, said China in a “slow race” with Japan and India to identify itself as the power of the Asia area.
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Ghosal reported from New Delhi. Follow him and McNeil on Twitter: aniruddhg1 and @stmcneil. Associated Press researcher Chen Si in Shanghai and researcher Yu Bing and manufacturer Olivia Zhang in Beijing contributed to the report.
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Department of Scientific Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is for all content only.