The Chinese mission was named Tianwen-1. (Representative)
Wenchang, China:
China intends to launch a rover to Mars on Thursday on a trip to coincide with a similar U.S. mission as the powers take their rivalry into deep space.
The two countries are taking advantage of a period when Earth and Mars are closest to send their probes, with the Chinese mission due to take off by Saturday and the US spacecraft on July 30.
It will be a crowded field. The United Arab Emirates launched a probe on Monday that will orbit Mars once it reaches the Red Planet.
But the race to watch is between the United States and China, which has worked hard to try to match Washington’s supremacy in space.
The Chinese mission was named Tianwen-1 (“Questions to Heaven”) in a nod to a classic poem that contains verses about the cosmos.
It is expected to launch Thursday March 5 – China’s largest space rocket – from the southern island of Hainan, depending on the weather.
The Tianwen-1 is expected to arrive in February 2021 after a trip of seven months and 55 million kilometers (34 million miles).
The mission includes a Mars orbiter, lander, and rover that will study the planet’s soil.
“As a first try for China, I don’t expect it to do anything significant beyond what the United States has already done,” said Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The United States has already sent four rovers to Mars since the late 1990s.
The next one, Perseverance, is an SUV-sized vehicle that will look for signs of ancient microbial life and collect rock and soil samples with the goal of bringing them back to Earth for another mission in 2031.
The Chinese mission is similar to NASA’s Viking missions in 1975-1976, in that it has both an orbiter and a lander, McDowell said.
Tianwen-1 is “broadly comparable to Viking in scope and ambition,” he added.
– Catch up –
After seeing the United States and the Soviet Union lead the way during the Cold War, China has invested billions of dollars in its military space program.
“China’s accession (to the race on Mars) will change the situation dominated by the United States for half a century,” said Chen Lan, independent analyst at GoTaikonauts.com, specializing in the Chinese space program.
China has made huge strides in the past decade, sending a human into space in 2003.
The Asian powerhouse has laid the groundwork to assemble a space station by 2022 and permanently gain a foothold in Earth orbit.
China has already sent two rovers to the moon. With the second, China became the first country to achieve a soft landing on the other side.
Missions to the Moon have given China the experience of operating spacecraft beyond Earth orbit, but Mars is another story.
The much greater distance means “a longer light travel time, so you have to do things slower because the round trip time of the radio signal is important,” McDowell said.
It also means “you need a more sensitive ground station on Earth because the signals will be much weaker,” he added, noting that there is a greater risk of failure.
China has upgraded its monitoring stations in far western Xinjiang and northeastern Heilongjiang Province to meet the demands of the Mars mission, state news agency Xinhua reported last week.
The majority of the dozens of missions sent by the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and India to Mars since 1960 have been unsuccessful.
Tianwen-1 isn’t China’s first attempt to go to Mars.
A previous mission with Russia in 2011 ended prematurely because the launch failed.
Now Beijing is trying for itself.
“As long as (Tianwen) lands safely on the Martian surface and returns the first image, the mission will be… a great success,” Chen said.
(This story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
