China aims for historic Mars mission by 2028 in its fight for space power

Hong Kong
CNN
—

China's historic attempt to bring samples from Mars back to Earth could launch as early as 2028, two years earlier than planned, a senior mission official said.

China's Tianwen-3 mission would conduct two launches around 2028 to retrieve Martian samples, the mission's chief designer Liu Jizhong said at a deep space exploration event in eastern Anhui province last week.

Planned mission launch more ambitious than 2030 target announcement by space officials earlier this year, though the timeline has fluctuated in recent years. A 2028 target appears to be back to a launch plan describe In 2022, a senior scientist involved in the Tianwen program developed a mission profile that would see samples returned to Earth by 2031.

The latest statements follow China's historic success in recovering the first samples from the far side of the Moon in June.

The move comes as efforts by NASA and the European Space Agency to retrieve samples from Mars are still being evaluated due to concerns about budget, complexity and risks. The U.S. space agency, which first landed on Mars decades ago, has said it is assess faster and more affordable plans to enable a faster result than would have been possible if samples were provided in 2040.

Becoming the first country to bring back samples from Mars would be a major achievement for China's ambitious space program and leader Xi Jinping's stated enduring dream of making the country a space power.

China's advances, including unmanned lunar missions and the establishment of its own orbital space station, come as the United States and other countries have stepped up their own space programs amid growing attention to potential access to resources and scientific benefits from lunar and deep-space exploration.

One of the top priorities of China's Tianwen-3 mission will be to search for signs of life on Mars. The mission will also attempt to make technical breakthroughs in surface sampling, takeoff and ascent from the Martian surface, and conduct a space rendezvous in Mars orbit, Liu said last week, according to Chinese state media.

In a separate interview with CGTN, the international division of Chinese state television, Liu highlighted the challenges associated with the mission, which is expected to involve two initial rocket launches and an unprecedented rocket launch from another planet to bring back the samples.

The return mission requires a launch from the surface of Mars. It is actually a small rocket launch, so it will be very difficult to guarantee the reliability of the entire flight, he said.

China will engage in international cooperation around the mission, including carrying payloads from other countries and sharing samples and data, as well as planning future Mars research, Liu also said.

Mars has long been considered by scientists as a key research destination that could reveal information about the existence of life beyond Earth and our own origins in the solar system.

China's Tianwen series of planetary exploration missions, whose name roughly translates to “questions to the sky,” had its first success in 2021, when its Tianwen-1 probe reached Mars orbit and deployed the Zhurong rover on the planet's surface.

Zhurong's landing on May 15, 2021, on a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia made China the third country after the Soviet Union and the United States to land on the planet, which is more than 30 million kilometers from Earth.

The rover's primary mission was to search for signs of ancient life and to study minerals, the environment and the distribution of water and ice on the plain.

Data returned from the rovers' initial study of the basin suggests that the Utopia Planitia basin contained water during a period tens of millions of years ago when many scientists thought Mars was dry and cold, according to 2022 research.

The rover was designed to operate for 90 days on Mars, but it continued for 358 days and traveled 1,921 meters (6,302 feet) on the planet. It went into hibernation in May 2022 due to what Chinese scientists said was an unpredictable accumulation of dust.

The United States made its first landing on the planet in 1976 with the Viking 1 mission, which included a lander that operated for more than six years. It was a feat that surpassed the Soviet Mars 3 spacecraft, which had touched down on the Martian surface in 1971 but transmitted signals for only a few years. 20 seconds.

The most recent U.S. landing on Mars was NASA's Perseverance rover, which touched down in Jezero Crater in 2021 and has since been collecting samples for later return to Earth.

NASA Director Bill Nelson earlier this year called The planned U.S. Mars sample return mission is one of the most complex missions NASA has ever undertaken.

The US space agency announced in April that it was looking for innovative new methods to retrieve surface samples, after a budget plan was increased to $11 billion with a sample return schedule of 2040. announcement He supported a handful of 90-day studies to find more affordable and faster methods.