China sets 2028 for its Mars mission. The USA is missing
China is on track to launch its Tianwen-3 mission to Mars in 2028, two years earlier than previously expected, while the US sampling mission to the planet is in limbo amid major delays and growing budgets. China, on the other hand, can afford to bring the times forward compared to previous forecasts.
Liu Jizhong, chief designer of China's Mars mission, said on Thursday at the Second International Conference on Deep Space Exploration in Huangshan, Anhui province, that the team aims to bring back about 600 grams of Martian soil.
The mission's timeline was also updated from an earlier estimate of 2030, a change that suggests China's growing confidence in its ability to equip itself with the right technology for the complex operation, according to Namrata Goswami, a space policy researcher at Arizona State University in the United States.
A 2028 launch date should see Martian samples return to Earth around July 2031, according to an earlier presentation made by Sun Zezhou, head of the Tianwen-1 mission, at Nanjing University in 2022. That's a bet that , if it bears fruit, could see China take the lead in the race to Mars.
The planet Mars
According to Goswami, the country that is the first to successfully complete a mission to Mars will become the world leader in space exploration. Advertisement “It would mean that the nation has achieved the ability to land safely, collect samples, launch a rocket from Mars and transport the samples 33 million miles [53 million km] to Earth,” he said.
Astrophysicist Quentin Parker, of the University of Hong Kong, described the timing as "aggressive". “There is now a real possibility that China could beat the United States to be the first to return samples from Mars,” he said.
According to Parker, who attended the two-day meeting along with around 100 international participants from countries including the United States, Europe, South Africa, Thailand, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, China is also offering 25kg of payload space international ships to be transported on the Tianwen-3 orbiter.
He said the meeting showed "in a very friendly and open way" China's willingness to cooperate and let others participate in the exploration of the Moon and Mars. Liu Jizhong, chief designer of the Tianwen-3 mission, explains the complex process of retrieving samples from Mars during the conference in Huangshan.
Presentation of the plan for the Martian mission
Liu explained that two Long March 5 rockets will send Tianwen-3's lander-elevator combination and orbiter-return module combination to Mars. Sample landing, sampling, liftoff and orbit transfer will build on key technologies used previously, including the Chang'e-5 and Chang'e-6 lunar sample return missions and landing mission on Mars Tianwen-1.
Tianwen-3 will use three methods to collect soil from the red planet's surface: surface collection at multiple points, deep drilling at fixed points and rover-based sampling, Liu told state news agency Xinhua. This “grab and go” approach will be different from NASA's. NASA's Perseverance rover, which has been exploring the bed of an ancient lake in the Jezero crater on Mars since 2021, has filled 25 test tubes with samples.
But NASA has problems: the NASA-ESA -designed MSR mission, which was supposed to bring Martian samples back to Earth for the USA, has been subject to uncertainty since September last year, when an independent review found that it would cost up to $11 billion and would not be completed until 2040. In June, NASA asked seven aerospace companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, to propose "outside the box" concepts to help deliver samples in quicker and cheaper way. The US space agency has said it aims to return the samples to Earth in 2030, but there is still no operational blueprint for how this should happen.
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The article China sets 2028 for its Mars mission. The USA is missing comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/la-cina-pone-il-2028-per-la-propria-missione-su-marte-gli-usa-latitano/ on Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:17:42 +0000.