BEIJING (AP) – China says its Tianwen-1 spacecraft has entered a temporary parking orbit around Mars in anticipation of landing a rover on the red planet in the coming months.
The National Space Administration of China said the spacecraft performed a maneuver to adjust its orbit in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Beijing time, and that it will remain in the new orbit for the next three months before attempting. to land. During this time, it will map the surface of Mars and use its cameras and other sensors to collect more data, particularly about its potential landing site.
This happened when the U.S. Perseverance rover landed last Thursday near an ancient river delta in Jezero crater to look for signs of ancient microscopic life.
If the Tianwen-1 landing was successfully achieved, China would become the second country after the US to place a spacecraft on Mars. China’s solar-powered vehicle, about the size of a golf cart, will collect data on groundwater and look for evidence that the planet may have had microscopic life.
Tianwen, the title of an ancient poem, means “Search for Heavenly Truth.”
Landing a spaceship on Mars is notoriously complicated. About a dozen orbits failed. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter linked to Mars that was part of a Russian mission did not leave Earth orbit.
China’s attempt will involve a parachute, rocket fire and airbags. Its proposed landing site is a vast rocky plain called Utopia Planitia, where the U.S. Viking 2 landing landed in 1976.
Tianwen-1’s arrival on Mars on February 10 was preceded by that of an UAE orbiter. The last three missions were launched in July to take advantage of the close alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only once every two years.
Tianwen-1 represents the most ambitious mission of the secret and war-linked space program of China that first put an astronaut in orbit around the Earth in 2003 and last year returned the lunar rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s. China was also the first country to land a spacecraft on the little-explored band of the Moon in 2019.
China is also building a permanent space station and is planning a manned lunar mission and a possible permanent research base on the Moon, although no dates have been proposed yet.
On Monday, a massive Y2 Long March-5B rocket was installed at the Wenchang spacecraft launch site in Hainan Province to assemble and test it before launching the space station’s central module, dubbed as Tianhe. The launch is scheduled for the first half of this year, the first of 11 missions planned over the next two years for the construction of the station.
China does not participate in the International Space Station, in part because of US insistence.
The space program is a source of enormous national pride in China and Tianwen-1 has attracted a particularly strong audience. Tourists flocked to the tropical island of Hainan to watch the launch, while others visit teases of Mars colonies in desert places with white domes, air locks and space suits.