China successfully launches its first space mission that will attempt to land on Mars – Explica

The Tianwen-1 mission will take 7 months to reach Mars and will attempt to orbit, land, and explore the red planet, all simultaneously.

The ambitious Chinese space program took the first step towards the red planet: the Tianwen-1 mission which in Chinese means questions to the heavens was successfully launched this Thursday morning from Wenchang, on the south coast of China.

Unlike other unmanned launches, Tianwen-1 has three unprecedented goals for a single mission: to orbit, land, and explore the Martian surface through a rover with six scientific instruments.

This is a comprehensive plan that, if carried out successfully, would represent a historic achievement for a relatively new country in space exploration that has tripled its launches in the last decade, with special emphasis on unmanned lunar exploration.

The Tianwen-1 orbiter aims to achieve the gravitational pull of Mars and send information from both the rover and its seven scientific instruments including radars, spectrometers, magnetometers, and particle analyzers.

After getting into orbit, the most complicated part of the mission will come: getting the lander (with the vehicle inside) to enter the atmosphere and land on Martian soil without taking further damage.

Using six scientific instruments, the missions rover aims to be the first to analyze ice below the surface and shed more clues to the Red Planets past, especially the likelihood that it had harbored life millions of years ago.

Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU

Tianwen-1 will travel some 58 million kilometers before reaching the fourth planets orbit with respect to the Sun in February 2021 and is part of the new 21st century space race, whose main objective is Mars.

The first mission to land a rover on Mars was the Soviet space probe Mars 3 in 1971. Five years later, NASAs Viking program captured the first sharp images of the red planet, and since then the United States has maintained rovers for various periods, such as Pathfinder and Curiosity exploring the surface of Mars.

In the near future, manned missions to Mars will mark humanitys first step on a planet other than Earth, and with them, different plans that seemed science fiction decades ago, such as establishing a Martian colony or working in terraforming the red planet, they could gain strength and become targets of agencies and aerospace companies.

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