The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
China takes the space race up a level with rocket quest to Mars
Mission could mean country joins USA in landing a craft on red planet
China has launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet in a bold attempt to join the United States in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet.
Tianwen-1 was launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Hainan Island, a resort province off the south coast of the mainland, state media said.
Livestreams showed a successful lift-off, with rockets blazing orange and the spacecraft heading upward across clear blue skies.
It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday.
And the US is aiming to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover ever, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, next week.
China’s tandem spacecraft – with both an orbiter and a rover – will take seven months to reach Mars, like the others. If all goes well, Tianwen-1, or “quest for heavenly truth”, will look for underground water and evidence of ancient life.
China’s secretive space programme has developed rapidly in recent decades.
Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut in 2003, and last year Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft from any country to land on the far side of the moon.
Conquering Mars would put China in an elite club.
“There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this,” said Dean Cheng, an expert on Chinese aerospace programmes at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the US has successfully landed a spacecraft on Martian soil, doing it eight times since 1976.
Six other spacecraft are exploring Mars from orbit: three American, two European and one from India.
National security concerns led the US to curb co-operation between Nasa and China’s space programme.
In an article published earlier this month in Nature Astronomy, mission chief engineer Wan Weixing said Tianwen-1 would slip into orbit around Mars in February and look for a landing site on Utopia Planitia – a plain where Nasa has detected possible evidence of underground ice.
There is a whole lot of prestige riding on this.
AEROSPACE EXPERT DEAN CHENG