Mars Rover's first launch in China can make history

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Daniel Oberhaus

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Over the past 20 years, the only sign of activity on Mars was a succession of vehicles built by NASA slowly rolling through the arid desert landscape. Today, only one of those rovers, Curiosity, is still operational. But in a few months, you will welcome new visitors on wheels. One of them is the descendant of Curiosity. His call is Perseverance and NASA sends him to a project to collect samples of Martian soil that may have life symptoms. It will be the largest and largest autonomous robot that has ever landed on the surface of any other planet.

The other newcomer will be Tianwen-1, an orbiter-lander-rover combo built across China. The rover is overshadowed by perseverance, however, it is still considered one of the maximum complex machines ever built. If China effectively deploys a rover to Mars, it will only be the time when the country in history succeeds. In addition to the United States, the only country that even tried was the Soviet Union, and failed twice. Mars is an incredibly complicated target, and for China, Tianwen-1 is a message to the rest of the world that it is no longer just a player in exploring the area; now he’s a leader.

“China will demonstrate that it has world-class clinical and technological capacity,” says Dean Cheng, Heritage Foundation trained in China’s area program. But it’s not just about projecting strength into the world, he says. It is also a primary point of national pride and a triumph of political will. “This is anything that proves to the Chinese that the Chinese Communist Party is tough and able to lead the nation,” Cheng says.

On Thursday, a Chinese March 5 rocket is expected to prostr Tianwen-1 on a six-month project on the Red Planet. (The Chinese government has kept quiet about the precise date of the project’s departure, but the release window extends until mid-August.) The Tianwen spacecraft is 3 spacecraft coordinated in one: it consists of a rover, a lander and an orbiter The rover is stored in the abdomen of the lander, and approximately two months after the probe’s arrival into Mars orbit, the lander will separate from the orbiter and move to the surface. The orbiter will spend at least a year monitoring the lander from above and transmitting the knowledge it collects to Earth, while conducting its own research.

Chinese scientists have not yet announced the rover’s landing site, but one of the main applicants is Utopia Planitia, a plain located in the world’s largest that has an effect on the crater. (It was also the destination of NASA’s Mars landing moment, Viking 2.) Once the rover is deployed, it will spend at least 3 months reading the Martian environment. The China National Space Administration has published some important points about the rover or the types of experiments it will conduct, however, an article published in Nature Astronomy this month through researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences says the purpose of the mission is to “conduct comprehensive research and in-depth examination of the entire planet.”

The rover has a set of solar panels coming out of its circular frame that will be used to force its communication systems and six integrated tools. In addition to two cameras, the rover will bring a radar to explore below the surface, a tool to stumble upon the weak magnetic box of Mars, a tool to measure the chemistry of the Martian soil and some other tool to monitor the climate of Mars. . Although the rover is limited to a few hundred meters around its contact site, the orbiter will gather more complete knowledge about the planet.

Tianwen-1 is China’s first committed project beyond the moon. (A few years ago, Chinese scientists hooked an orbiter to Mars in a Russian project, but the project failed some time after launch.) Although those are basically equivalent feats that the American spacecraft completed decades ago, Tianwen-1 is notable for doing all at the same time. U.S. scientists placed the first orbiter around Mars in 1971 and the first lander on its surface five years later. But it took another 20 years for NASA to deploy its first rover to Mars, and it’s much smaller than China’s. “If successful, [Tianwen-1] would mean a primary technical breakthrough,” the Chinese project scientists wrote at Nature Astronomy. “No planetary project has been implemented in this way.”

This is an easy decision, but it is consistent with China’s broader technique for area exploration. Last year, China’s Chang’e four project became the first to place a lander on the other side of the Moon, and the scout vehicle it deployed still travels across the surface more than a year later. Last month, China’s National Space Administration completed the BeiDou navigation system, a national edition of the U.S.-controlled GPS network. The Chinese army has built and tested a robot area aircraft similar to the mysterious U.S. Air Force X-37B area aircraft, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences operates the world’s largest radio telescope. The Chinese area firm pioneered quantum satellite communications, it is building its own area station, which the United States may not find policy to do it alone, and yes, it even has plans for a lunar base. There are still occasional missteps that one could expect from a mature area program, such as the chaotic re-entry of the Tiangong-1 area station a few years ago, but which of us has not lost control of an area station at some point ?

China’s spacefaring ambitions have a lot in common with NASA’s own plans for the future. But it’s complicated by the fact that there isn’t really a distinction between China’s civilian and military space programs. The China National Space Administration is the equivalent of NASA and employs the scientists that develop the instruments and study the data on missions like Tianwen-1, but it is managed by China’s People’s Liberation Army. “China’s space program is dominated by the military,” says Cheng. “The guys who understand the science are civilians, but they report to military officers.” This also means that all space technologies are considered “dual use.” The same assembly line that made the rocket to send Tianwen-1 to Mars is also cranking out boosters made for war.

But that doesn’t mean the Tianmen-1 mission is solely—or even mostly—a military flex. Cheng says it’s first and foremost about science, even if the lessons learned during the mission end up benefiting the military too. He says that the Mars shot will give the Chinese military a “thorough workout” on several processes relevant to national security, like using its deep-space communications network and demonstrating its capacity to precisely track small objects in the vast, empty expanse of deep space.

“It’s not like China is going to land missiles on Mars,” Cheng says. “But it is the kind of thing that is going to benefit their military industrial complex.”

But that’s the way it’s always been in China. In the 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong launched the country’s “two bombs, one satellite” program with the explicit aim of developing missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads and loft satellites into orbit. But now that China is catching up to the US in the final frontier, the dual nature of these technologies has raised fears among US policymakers and military officials that the world may be on the brink of a new “space race.”

“Space is the new high ground in great-power competition, and the US must secure and maintain its superiority there,” Major Liane Zivitski, a US Air Force intelligence officer, wrote in an op-ed for DefenseNews last month, citing the Tianwen-1 mission as evidence of the country’s increasing launch capabilities. “Beijing’s track record of deviation from international norms leaves the US no choice but to prepare to defend itself.”

Concerns about a militarized career in the area are not new, but it is not as if extraterrestrial international relations are on the table. NASA and U.S.-area corporations were banned from running with China in the mid-1990s after a Congressional investigation accused China of stealing devices from a U.S. communications satellite. (At that time, satellites containing PORTIONs of the United States can still catch Chinese rockets.) In 2011, the ban became law when the U.S. then Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Virginia), who in the past called China an “evil empire” comparable to Nazi Germany, added an amendment to a NASA appropriations bill that prohibited agency scientists from engaging with Chinese citizens affiliated with the Chinese. Government. It has been renewed every year since.

“He put those two sentences on NASA’s appropriations bill in large part because he believed there was a devout persecution in China and that democracies were not cooperating with communist countries,” says Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert in china’s area program and a professor of national security issues. AT US Naval War College. “In fact, there are disorders with China and the transfer of generation, but I think it has as much to do with politics as it does anything else.”

It was a fateful decision. The United States has prevented China from participating in collaborative projects such as the International Space Station, and the International Arms Trafficking Regulation (ITAR) has prevented China from flying payloads containing U.S. components. These exclusion policies were intended to protect the secrets of the U.S. military and its allies, but they also forced the Chinese government to expand the generation and experience needed to become a primary area power. “After a while, they began to recognize that there were benefits in doing this alone,” Johnson-Freese says. “While they were alone, they controlled their schedule than American politics.”

Tianmen-1 is China’s top ambitious foray into the deep area to date, and shows how much the country’s area program has evolved over the past two decades. The country has still surpassed America’s extraterrestrial achievements. But his plan for Mars shows that the technological hole between the two countries in the area is quickly final.

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Mars Rover’s first launch in China can make history

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