BEIJING – China on Thursday presented its most ambitious project to Mars in an ambitious attempt to get 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 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 to enter the programmed orbit,” he said in brief comments broadcast live on the state-owned CCTV.
China’s area firm said the rocket carried the area ship for 36 minutes before effectively hitting it on a looping path that would take it beyond Earth’s orbit and, in spite of everything, to 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 exploded on Monday on a rocket from Japan. And the United States intends to launch Perseverance, its complicated Mars 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.”
China’s tandem spacecraft, with an orbiter and rover, will take seven months to succeed on Mars, just like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “search for heavenly truth,” will search for 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 was lost when the spacecraft was unable to leave Earth’s orbit after its liberation from Kazakhstan, despite everything burning 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.
The conquest of 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.
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 lander and Curiosity rover 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, the project’s leading engineer, Wan Weixing, said Tianwen-1 would enter 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 lands on Mars, Liu Tongjie said. “For example, if there’s a sandstorm, you have to replace the way it works to prevent sand from falling on a solar panel, which will allow you to get power,” he said.
Although small compared to the perseverance of 1,025 kilograms (2,260 pounds) in 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 in what is happening with those 3 exclusive missions to Mars. Each is a marvel of science and engineering,” said Thomas Zelibor, CEO of area foundation, at a previous 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, may 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 outperform the United States 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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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.