A day after the United Arab Emirates Orbit of hope arrived on Mars, China’s most ambitious Tianwen-1 spacecraft, carrying state-of-the-art instruments, a lander and a six-wheeled rover, which slid into orbit around the red planet on Wednesday after a seven-month journey from Earth.
Tianwen-1’s arrival came just eight days before NASA’s $ 2.4 billion Perseverance rover enters the Martian atmosphere and descends to the ground of Jezero crater to look for signs of past microbial life around an ancient river delta and lake bed deposits.
Perseverance is the most technologically advanced spacecraft ever sent to Mars, but Tianwen-1, the first all-Chinese mission to the red planet and its most sophisticated spacecraft to date, demonstrates the growing maturity and scope of the Chinese space program.
CGTN
“Tianwen-1 will orbit, land and release a rover all on the first attempt and coordinate observations with an orbiter,” the mission managers wrote before the launch in the journal Nature Astronomy. “No planetary mission has ever been implemented this way. If successful, it would mean a major technical breakthrough.”
Tianwen-1, released on July 23, 2020, from the Wenchang satellite launch center on Hainan Island, took seven months to complete its long flight to Mars. The spacecraft hit its target on Wednesday, firing its main engine for about 15 minutes to slow down enough to be captured by the gravity of the red planet.
“China’s first spacecraft on Mars Tianwen-1 has successfully entered the orbit of the red planet after a crucial ‘brake’ to slow down and be captured by the gravity of Mars,” tweeted CGTN, a state channel in English .
The Tianwen-1 mother ship, which will remain in polar orbit throughout its two-year mission, is equipped with seven instruments, including high- and medium-resolution cameras; a radar that penetrates the earth; a mineralogy spectrometer; a magnetometer; and two charged particle detectors.
The orbiter is expected to launch a landing craft in May that will descend to a rocket-propelled touchdown on a 2,000-mile-wide plain known as Utopia Planitia.
The 530-pound rover will descend to the surface firmly locked in place of the lander’s top deck. If all goes well, extendable ramps will be deployed and the rover will be driven to the surface for a planned 90-day mission.
Equipped with six instruments, including a multi-spectral camera, a terrain camera, a ground-penetrating radar, a magnetic field detector, meteorological sensors and others, the rover will communicate with Earth flight controllers via the Tianwen-1 orbiter as a relay station. .
China has successfully sent two rovers to the moon, including one that landed on the far side never before visited. The attempt to send an orbiter to Mars aboard a Russian rocket in 2011 ended in failure when the Zenit booster did not work properly.
NASA is the clear world leader in Mars exploration and successfully landed eight spacecraft on the Martian surface: two Vikings in 1976; the Mars Pathfinder rover in 1997; the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in 2004; the Phoenix stationary lander in 2008; the Curiosity rover with nuclear power in 2012; and InSight’s fixed landing in 2018.
InSight and Curiosity are still operational, as are three NASA orbiters.
Perseverance, an improved version of Curiosity and four times heavier than its Chinese cousin, is the most advanced engine of all. It is equipped with state-of-the-art cameras and instruments to look for signs of past microbial life.
It will also deploy a small one experimental helicopter – A first on Mars – and collect samples of rock and soil for their return to Earth for a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission at the end of the decade.
The Chinese say they are also planning a mission to return samples from Mars by 2030.