China launches space rocket in ambitious Mars landing mission
China has launched its most ambitious Mars mission yet in a bold attempt to join the US in successfully landing a spacecraft on the red planet.
With engines blazing orange, a Long March 5 carrier rocket took off on Thursday at about 12.40 pm local time (0540 BST) from Hainan Island, south of the Chinese mainland. Hundreds of space enthusiasts watched from a beach across the bay.
The launch commander, Zhang Xueyu, announced that the rocket was flying normally about 45 minutes later. “The Mars rover has accurately entered the scheduled orbit,” he said in brief live remarks on the state broadcaster CCTV.
It marked the second flight to Mars this week, after a United Arab Emirates orbiter blasted off on a rocket from Japan on Monday.
The US is also planning to launch Perseverance, its most sophisticated Mars rover so far, from Cape Canaveral in Florida next week.
China’s tandem spacecraft – with both an orbiter and a rover – will take seven months to reach Mars. If all goes well, the Tianwen-1 mission will look for underground water as well as evidence of possible ancient life.
It is not China’s first attempt at Mars. In 2011, a Chinese orbiter accompanying a Russian mission was lost when the spacecraft failed to get out of Earth’s orbit after launching from Kazakhstan, eventually burning up in the atmosphere. This time, China is going at it alone.
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 DC.
Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult. Only the US has successfully landed a spacecraft on the planet’s soil, a total of eight times since 1976. Nasa’s InSight lander and Curiosity rover still operate today. Six other spacecrafts are exploring Mars from orbit: three American, two European and one Indian.
Unlike the two other Mars missions launching this month, China has tightly controlled information about the programme — even withholding any name for its rover. National security concerns led the US to curb cooperation between Nasa and China’s space programme.
In an article published earlier this month in Nature Astronomy, the mission’s former 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. Wan died in May from cancer.
According to the article, the landing would then be attempted in April or May. If all goes well, the 240kg (530lb) golf cart-sized, solar-powered rover is expected to operate for about three months, and the orbiter for two years.
Though small compared with the US’s car-sized 1,025kg Perseverance, it is almost twice as big as the two rovers China sent to the moon in 2013 and 2019. Perseverance is expected to operate for at least two years.
This Mars-launching season – which occurs every 26 months when Earth and Mars are at their closest – is especially busy.
The UAE spacecraft Amal, or Hope, which will orbit Mars but not land, is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. Nasa’s Perseverance rover is up next.
“At no other time in our history have we seen anything like what is unfolding with these three unique missions to Mars. Each of them is a science and engineering marvel,” Thomas Zelibor, the chief executive officer of the non-profit Space Foundation, said in an online panel discussion earlier this week.
While China is joining the US, Russia and Europe in creating a satellite-based global navigation system, experts say it is not trying to overtake the US lead in space exploration.
Instead, according to Cheng, China is in a “slow race” with Japan and India to establish itself as Asia’s space power.