China, Preparing For The Exploration Of Planet Mars

Illustration of the Tianwen-1 mission (doc. China National Space Administration)

JAKARTA - It is not only the United States (US) that wants to explore Mars. The Chinese Space Agency also intends to explore the red planet in the next few months.

As quoted from Spacenews, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced a Mars exploration program code-named "Tianwen-1". This announcement coincides with the 50th anniversary of China's first satellite launch into space.

"The name Tianwen is taken from a Chinese poetry stanza by the poet Qu Yuan, which translates to 'search for heavenly truth'," said CNSA Director Zhang Kejian, Monday, April 27.

Zhang explained, the Tianwen-1 mission is planned to take place in July and will be launched using a Long March 5 rocket from Wenchang, China. For three months, Tianwen-1 will explore the surface of Mars using a new robotic probe developed by CNSA.

In this mission, CSNA will focus its exploration in the Utopia Planitia area. Where the Tianwen-1 mission is designed to study the composition of the Martian atmosphere and study evidence of past and present life on the Red Planet.

In fact, the Tianwen-1 mission is China's second experiment to Mars. Where previously in 2011 they launched the Yinghuo-1 orbiter with the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, but the experiment failed because the booster rocket suffered a technical failure.

A bit of good news from #Mars: our new approach of using the robotic arm to push the mole appears to be working! The teams @ NASAJPL / @ DLR_en are excited to see the images and plan to continue this approach over the next few weeks. 💪 #SaveTheMole FAQ: https://t.co/wnhp7c1gPT pic.twitter.com/5wYyn7IwVo

- NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) March 13, 2020

In this mission, Tianwen-1 will be launched together with NASA's Perseverance Mars 2020 rover and the United Arab Emirates' Hope lander probe. Meanwhile, ESA's exploration mission, Rover Rosalind Franklin ExoMars, had to be postponed until 2022.

So far, only the United States (US) and Russia have successfully landed their robot explorers on Mars. In addition, the European and Indian Space Agencies have also reached the orbital of the red planet.