A powerful Long March 5 rocket took off Thursday with a Chinese orbiter, lander, and rover on a seven-month trip to Mars, the second of three high-risk missions on the Red Planet and one that, if successful, It will put China on the front lines of interplanetary exploration.
China did not announce the launch date or time in advance, but a notice to seafarers warned of an impending flight, and indeed on March 5 it roared to life and moved away from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the island of Hainan southwest of Hong Kong at 12:41 am EDT (12:41 pm local time).
China Xinhua News announced the launch a few minutes later on Twitter.
The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation later confirmed a successful launch and said the Tianwen-1 spacecraft had been placed on the planned path to Mars.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted his best wishes to China:
The flight arrives just after the successful launch of a United Arab Emirates Mars Orbiter, named Hope, from Japan on Sunday. Next will be the launch of NASA’s $ 2.4 billion. Perseverance Mars rover from Cape Canaveral on July 30.
All three missions are taking advantage of a relatively short Mars launch opportunity that occurs once every 26 months when Earth and Mars are in favorable positions to allow direct flights from existing rockets. All three spacecraft are expected to reach their target next February.
NASA’s Perseverance rover got its name from a Virginia seventh grader who won a NASA contest Open to school children across the country. Hope refers to the UAE’s drive to develop a “knowledge-based” high-tech economy while inspiring young people in the Middle East to pursue careers in math and science.
Tianwen-1’s name comes from an ancient Chinese poem and appropriately means “questions to heaven.” If all goes well, the 11,000-pound Tianwen-1 spacecraft will orbit around Mars next February.
China Xinhua News
The orbiter is equipped with seven instruments, including high and medium resolution cameras; ground penetrating radar; a mineralogy spectrometer; a magnetometer and two charged particle detectors. Its planned orbit around the Martian poles will take it within approximately 165 miles of the surface and as far as 7,450 miles.
After mapping the world below for several months, the orbiter will launch a landing craft that will descend to a rocket-powered landing on a 2,000-mile-wide wide plain known as Utopia Planitia, the same general region where the lander touched down. Viking 1 from NASA. down in 1976.
The 530-pound, six-wheeled rover will descend on the lander and then exit the extendable ramps to the surface. The rover is equipped with six instruments, including a multispectral camera, a terrain camera, a ground penetrating radar, a magnetic field detector, meteorological sensors, and others.
The rover is designed to receive commands and send data to Earth using the Tianwen-1 orbiter as a relay station.
“A successful landing would place China among the elite companies,” Mason Peck, an aerospace engineer at Cornell University, told Science magazine.
China Global Television Network
China has successfully shipped two tramps to the moonIncluding one that landed on the far side never visited before. An attempt to send an orbiter to Mars in 2011, hitchhiking on a Russian rocket, ended in failure when the Zenit booster did not work properly.
The all-Chinese Tianwen-1 mission is the nation’s most ambitious attempt at interplanetary exploration.
“Tianwen-1 will orbit, land and launch an entire rover on the first attempt, and will coordinate observations with an orbiter,” mission managers wrote in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Planetary missions have never been implemented in this way. If successful, it would mean a major technical advance.”
The solar powered rover is designed to operate for at least 90 days, while the orbiter’s lifespan is one full Martian year, the equivalent of two Earth years.
NASA has successfully landed eight spacecraft on the Martian surface: two Vikings in 1976; the Mars Pathfinder rover in 1997; twins Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, in 2004; the stationary Phoenix lander in 2008; the nuclear powered Curiosity rover in 2012; and the stationary InSight lander in 2018.
InSight and Curiosity are still operational, as are three NASA orbiters.
Perseverance, almost Curiosity’s twin and four times heavier than its Chinese cousin, is the most advanced rover of all. It is equipped with state-of-the-art cameras and instruments to look for signs of past or even current microbial life.
It will also deploy a small experimental helicopter, the first on Mars, and will collect rock and soil samples for its eventual return to Earth by a joint mission by NASA and the European Space Agency in the late decade.
The Chinese say they are also planning a return mission to Mars around 2030.
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