China’s First Mars Mission Ready for Takeoff

BEIJING, KOMPAS.com — Plans for China’s first Mars mission are taking shape as the country recently moved a rocket into position to launch a rover to Mars.

This will the first of three upcoming missions to Mars alongside the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

China’s first Mars mission will use the Long March-5 carrier rocket which is its heaviest-lift launch vehicle.

The carrier rocket has been used experimentally three times though never with a payload.

The objective of its interstellar mission, dubbed Tianwen-1, is to gather scientific data.

China’s first Mars mission is set to blast off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in the province of Hainan in late July or early August.

The information was shared by state media reports on July 17 that quoted the China National Space Administration.

The Chinese space program has swiftly progressed since launching its first mission back in 2003.

The upcoming mission is one of the most ambitious Chinese space program yet.

Since 2003, China has sent astronauts to an experimental space station, begun work on a larger, more permanent facility, and landed a probe on the less-explored far side of the moon.

The combined effort of all three Mars missions is to find signs of ancient microscopic life while scouting out Mars for future astronauts.

The timelines for such missions are daunting and the countries involved are striving to take the best advantage of a one-month window in which Mars and Earth are in ideal alignment on the same side of the sun. 

Doing so minimizes travel time and fuel use. Such a window opens only once every 26 months.

Preparations have continued amid the coronavirus outbreak, which in part prompted Europe and Russia to drop their plans to send a life-seeking rover to Mars this summer.

Each spacecraft will travel more than 480 million kilometers (300 million miles) before reaching Mars next February.

In the process, they will loop out beyond Earth’s orbit and sync up with Mars’ more distant orbit around the sun.

The US is sending over a car-sized six-wheeled rover named Perseverance to collect rock samples to be returned to Earth for analysis in about a decade.

Its launch date has been set for between July 30 and Aug. 15.

The UAE spacecraft, named Amal, or “Hope” in Arabic, is an orbiter built in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder and is now scheduled to launch from Japan on Monday.

It will be the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission.

Scientists want to know what Mars was like billions of years ago, back when it had water sources that may have supported tiny life forms before turning into the frozen world it is today.

So far, the US has been the only country to successfully put a spacecraft on Mars, doing it eight times.

Two NASA landers are operating there, InSight and Curiosity. Six other spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three US, two European and one from India.

China’s last attempt at a Mars mission in collaboration with Russia ended in failure in 2011.

The Chinese space program's close military connections and the relative secrecy within it operates has limited its opportunities for cooperation with those of the US and other countries. 

(Writer: AP)

Source: https://apnews.com/b864bfa8365c9610b6304a16ce5e4320