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A day after the UAE Orbiter of Hope reached Mars, China’s most ambitious Tianwen-1 spacecraft, carrying state-of-the-art instruments, a lander and a six-wheeled rover, gliding 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 bottom of Jezero Crater to look for signs of past microbial life in and around an ancient river delta and lake-bottom deposits.
Perseverance is the most technologically advanced spacecraft to ever fly to Mars, but Tianwen-1, the first all-Chinese mission to the Red Planet and its most sophisticated space probe to date, demonstrates the growing maturity and scope of the Chinese space program.
CGTN
“Tianwen-1 will orbit, land and release a very first-test rover, and coordinate observations with an orbiter,” mission managers wrote ahead of the launch in the journal Nature Astronomy. “No planetary mission has ever been implemented in this way. If successful, it would mean a major technical breakthrough.”
Tianwen-1, launched on July 23, 2020, from the Wenchang satellite launch center on Hainan Island, took seven months to complete its long flight to Mars. The probe hit its target on Wednesday, pulling its main engine for about 15 minutes to slow enough to be captured by the gravity of the Red Planet.
“China’s first Tianwen-1 probe on Mars has successfully entered Red Planet orbit after a crucial ‘brake’ to decelerate and be captured by gravity from Mars,” tweeted CGTN, an English-language public broadcaster. .
The Tianwen-1 mothership, which will remain in polar orbit throughout its two-year mission, is equipped with seven instruments, including high and medium resolution cameras; radar penetrating the ground; a mineralogy spectrometer; a magnetometer; and two charged particle detectors.
The Orbiter is expected to release a landing craft in May that will descend to a rocket-propelled landing on a wide 2,000-mile-wide plain known as Utopia Planitia.
The 530-pound rover will descend to the surface firmly locked in place on the upper deck of the lander. If all goes well, extendable ramps will deploy and the rover will descend to the surface for a scheduled 90-day mission.
Equipped with six instruments, including a multispectral camera, field camera, ground-penetrating radar, magnetic field detector, weather sensors and others, the rover will communicate with flight controllers on Earth using the Tianwen-1 orbiter as a relay station.
China has successfully sent two rovers to the Moon, including one that landed on the other side of the country, never visited before. An attempt to send an orbiter to Mars on top of a Russian rocket in 2011 ended in failure when the Zenit booster malfunctioned.
NASA is the undisputed world leader in the exploration of Mars, having successfully landed eight spaceships on the Martian surface: two Vikings in 1976; the Mars Pathfinder rover in 1997; the Mars exploration twins, Spirit and Opportunity, in 2004; the Phoenix lander stationary in 2008; the nuclear-powered Curiosity rover in 2012; and the InSight fixed lander 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 rover 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 experimental helicopter – a first on Mars – and collect rock and soil samples for a possible return to Earth by a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission at the end of the decade.
The Chinese say they are also planning a sample return mission to Mars around 2030.
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