China, which is pouring billions into its space programme and working to catch up with the U.S. and Europe, announced in April it aims to send a spacecraft “around 2020” to orbit Mars, land and deploy the rover. Image of China’s Mars probe was also released Tuesday.
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NASA has plans to launch their next Mars rover in 2020 as well, as part of the American space agency’s larger plan to send a crewed mission to the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s. “The challenges we face are unprecedented”. According to the plan, the six-wheeled, 200-kilogram vehicle will be delivered to the surface with the help of a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Wenchang space launch center in south China’s Hainan province. After the seven-month journey to Mars, the rover will separate from the orbiter and land in the northern hemisphere of the planet, relatively close to the equator.
Zhang Rongqiao, the general designer of China’s first Mars probe, said the Mars program will study the planet’s climate, surface, ionosphere, water ice distribution, internal structure, topography and physical field.
The very nature of the mission means that no exact schedule has been laid out yet, however, we may be looking at a July or August schedule.
China intends to sent to Mars a new rover. For now the probe and rover have no names, China is holding a contest to name both components for the mission.
China’s space program has been successful in landing a rover on the moon in the past becoming the third country to do so.
It held the record as the most durable rover for 30 years until the arrival of the Mars Exploration Rovers.
While China has been ramping up to become a superpower in space exploration, Zhang admitted that the Mars mission poses “greater difficulties and sophistication”. In December 2013, the nation’s Chang’e 3 spacecraft pulled off the first “soft landing”, as opposed to crash landing, on the Moon since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 touched down in 1976.
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Before this announcement, the United States’ Congress had denied NASA from working alongside China’s aeronautical administration because of security concerns, and Beijing has tested missiles with anti-satellite capabilities.
