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China’s Tianwen 1 spacecraft – in orbit around Mars since February – is expected to deploy a descent module to attempt the country’s first landing on the Red Planet in mid-May. Officials plan to share scientific data from the Mars rover with researchers around the world, a senior Chinese scientist said last week.
Chinese officials have not announced the exact date of the attempted Mars landing. Tianwen 1 mission leaders have more flexibility in setting the landing date than those in other Mars missions.
Tianwen 1 will release its lander and rover from its position in orbit around Mars. Most landers on Mars, such as NASA’s Perseverance rover, enter the Martian atmosphere following a direct path from Earth. These trajectories generally have predefined landing dates linked to the launch of the missions.
Wang Chi, director of the National Center for Space Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said on March 23 that the Tianwen 1 lander and rover are expected to land on Mars in May.
“China’s first mission to Mars, Tianwen 1, is now in orbit around Mars, and we are landing in mid-May,” Wang said in a presentation to the Space Studies Council of the National Academies. “We are open to international cooperation and the data will soon be publicly available.”
The Tianwen 1 spacecraft entered orbit around Mars on February 10, completing an almost seven-month interplanetary journey that began last July with a launch of a heavy Long March 5 rocket, the most powerful launcher in the world. Chinese inventory.
The arrival of the Tianwen 1 spacecraft on Mars made China the sixth country or space agency to have a probe orbiting the Red Planet, after the United States, the former Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, India and the United Arab Emirates.
Since February 10, the Tianwen 1 spacecraft has maneuvered into an orbit closer to Mars. The orbiter’s current trajectory brings it 280 kilometers and 59,000 kilometers closer to Mars. Tianwen 1 circles the red planet every two days or so.
Tianwen 1 arrived on Mars a day after the United Arab Emirates’ Orbiter Hope orbited the Red Planet and eight days before NASA’s Perseverance rover landed. The favorable planetary alignment of Earth and Mars that allowed the three missions to reach Mars in February occurs once every 26 months.
The Tianwen 1 lander and rover will target landing in a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars called Utopia Planitia.
If China achieves this feat, it will make China the third country to soft-land on Mars – after the Soviet Union and the United States – and the second country to drive a robotic robot on the Red Planet.
The Tianwen 1 orbiter, which will continue its mission after the lander and rover are released, is designed to operate for at least one Martian year, or roughly two years on Earth. The solar-powered rover, equipped with six wheels for mobility, has a life expectancy of at least 90 days, Chinese officials said.
Once it releases the lander and rover, the Tianwen 1 orbiter will adjust its orbit to transition to regular science operations. The orbiter will also take communication signals between ground controllers in China and the rover exploring the Martian surface.
The Tianwen 1 rover is encased in a heat shield for a fiery descent to the surface of Mars. After breaking free from the orbiter mothership, the lander will enter the atmosphere of the Red Planet, deploy a parachute, and then fire a brake rocket to slow the landing.
Assuming the landing is successful, the rover will activate cameras, underground radar, sensors to measure the composition of Martian rocks, a magnetic field monitor, and a weather station to begin collecting data at the Utopia Planitia site.
With the recent arrival of the Chinese Tianwen 1 and Hope missions from the United Arab Emirates, eight orbiters are now operating on Mars.
NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and MAVEN Atmospheric Observatory are currently returning data from Mars orbit, as well as the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and India’s Mars mission. Orbit.
NASA said last week that it had had a “limited exchange” of information with the Chinese space agency since Tianwen 1 arrived on the Red Planet to share data on the orbits of Mars orbiters. The data-sharing initiative aims to reduce the risk of collisions between spacecraft operating on Mars, NASA said.
A provision in the law known as the Wolf Amendment prohibits most bilateral cooperation between the US and Chinese space programs. The Wolf Amendment is named after former Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Virginia, who first inserted the language into a NASA budget bill in 2011.
But the law does not restrict all contact between NASA and the Chinese space agency, provided the proposed collaboration passes FBI review and NASA notifies Congress of the exchange at least 30 days in advance. .
The Chinese National Space Administration confirmed in a statement on Wednesday that it had held “working meetings” with NASA from January to March on “the exchange of ephemeris data to ensure the safety of flights of spacecraft from March”.
While NASA’s collaboration with the Chinese space program is limited, other nations have become more involved in Chinese missions like Tianwen 1.
Scientists from the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie, or IRAP, in France have contributed to a laser-induced fracture spectroscopy instrument on the Tianwen 1 rover.
French scientists, with support from the French space agency CNES, have provided advice to their Chinese counterparts on the spectroscopy technique, which uses a laser to zap a part the size of a pinhead from a rock, and a spectrometer to analyze the light emitted by the generated plasma. by the interaction of the laser with the rock surface.
The technique allows an instrument to determine the chemical composition of rocks on Mars. French scientists also provided China with a calibration target for the rover’s laser spectroscopy instrument.
The same French team worked on instruments on NASA’s Mars Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Scientists hope to cross-calibrate measurements between the two US-led missions and China’s Tianwen 1 rover.
Scientists from the Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences contributed to the development of the Tianwen 1 orbiter’s magnetometer and helped calibrate the flight instrument.
Argentina is home to a Chinese-owned deep space tracking antenna used to communicate with Tianwen 1. The European Space Agency has also agreed to provide airtime for Tianwen 1 through its own global network of satellite stations. deep space pursuit.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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