The first fully local Chinese Mars mission is on its way to the Red Planet.
the Tianwen-1 Mission launched on a Long rocket March 5 from the Hainan Island Wenchang Satellite Launch Center this morning (July 23) at 12:41 am EDT (0441 GMT).
Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiting duo and a lander / rover, a combination of ships that have never before been launched together towards the Red Planet. Tianwen-1’s ambition is especially surprising given that it is China’s first stab at a full mission to Mars. (The nation launched a Red Planet orbiter called Yinghuo-1 in November 2011, but the spacecraft flew piggyback with that of Russia. Phobos-Grunt Mission. And that launch failed, leaving the probes trapped in Earth’s orbit.)
“Tianwen-1 will orbit, land and launch an entire rover on the first attempt, and will coordinate observations with an orbiter,” the team members wrote in a recent Nature Astronomy article outlining the main objectives of the mission. “Planetary missions have never been implemented in this way. If successful, it would mean a major technical advance.”
Related: This is what the Chinese Tianwen-1 Mars mission will do
Taking the measurement of Mars
If all goes according to plan, Tianwen-1 will hit the Red Planet in February 2021. The landing / rover pair will land on the Martian surface two to three months later somewhere within Utopia Planitia, a great plain in the hemisphere. north of the planet. who also welcomed NASA Viking 2 lander in 1976
The solar powered rover will spend about 90 Martian days, or suns, studying its surroundings in detail. (A sun is approximately 40 minutes longer than an Earth day). It will do so with six different scientific instruments, which the Nature Astronomy document identified as the multispectral camera, the terrain camera, the Mars-Rover subsurface exploration radar, the Mars surface composition detector, the Mars magnetic field detector and Mars weather monitor.
The orbiter will eventually settle in a polar elliptical orbit that will take it as close to the Martian surface as 165 miles (265 km) and as far as 7,456 miles (12,000 km). The spacecraft will transmit information home from the rover and collect scientific data on its own using seven scientific instruments: two cameras, the Mars orbiting subsurface exploration radar, the Mars mineralogy spectrometer, the Mars magnetometer, the analyzer ion and neutral particle analyzer from Mars and the energy particle analyzer from Mars.
Apparently, the lander won’t do any substantive science work, serving as a delivery system for the rover. That wheeled explorer, incidentally, tips the scales at about 530 pounds. (240 kilograms), making it twice as heavy as the China line Yutu rovers moon explorers.
In general, Tianwen-1 aims to take the measurement of Mars in several ways.
“Specifically, the scientific objectives of Tianwen-1 include: (1) mapping morphology and geological structure, (2) investigating the characteristics of the soil surface and the distribution of water ice, (3) analyzing the composition of the material of the surface, (4) to measure the ionosphere and the characteristics of the Martian climate and environment on the surface, and (5) to perceive the physical fields (electromagnetic, gravitational) and the internal structure of Mars, “wrote the members of the mission team in the Nature Astronomy article.
The document also explained the name of the mission: Tianwen means “questions to heaven”, and was taken from the title of a poem by Qu Yuan, who lived between 340 and 278 BC. C.
Related: Occupy Mars: History of the robotic missions of the Red Planet (infographic)
Mars summer
Tianwen-1 was the second mission from Mars to take off in the past four days.
The United Arab Emirates’ Orbiter Hope launched on Sunday (July 19) to study the Martian atmosphere and climate, traversing space from Japan on an H-2A rocket. Like Tianwen-1, Hope (also known as the Emirates Mars Mission) is historical: it is the first interplanetary mission developed by an Arab state.
And the summer on Mars is not over yet. NASA’s next Mars rover, the 2,300-pound rover. (1,040 kg) Perseverance, is scheduled to take off on July 30.
This grouping of launches is dictated by orbital dynamics; Earth and Mars align correctly for interplanetary missions for just a few weeks once every 26 months. (The European-Russian ExoMars rover was supposed to join the launch party this summer, but suffered technical problems and now you must wait until 2022.)
Perseverance, the centerpiece of the $ 2.7 billion Mars Mission 2020It will look for signs of ancient life within the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero crater, which housed a lake and river delta billions of years ago. Perseverance will also do other work, including collecting and caching samples for the future return to Earth. Mars 2020 will also demonstrate new technologies, such as the first helicopter to fly alien skies and a device designed to generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide.
All three missions are slated to arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021. So when the summer of Mars comes to an end, we will still have a winter on the Red Planet to look forward to.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
