China Launches Mission To Mars
A Long March-5 rocket, carrying an orbiter, lander and rover as part of the Tianwen-1 mission to Mars, lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in southern China’s Hainan Province on July 23, 2020. Noel CELIS / AFPChina launched a rover to Mars on Thursday, a journey coinciding with a similar US mission as the powers take their rivalry into deep space.
Engineers and other employees cheered at the launch site on the southern island of Hainan as it lifted off into blue sky aboard a Long March 5 — China’s biggest space rocket.The five-tonne Tianwen-1 is expected to arrive in February 2021 after a seven-month, 55-million-kilometre voyage.“As a first try for China, I don’t expect it to do anything significant beyond what the US has already done,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Tianwen-1 is “broadly comparable to Viking in its scope and ambition”, said McDowell, referring to NASA’s Mars landing missions in 1975-1976.After watching the United States and the Soviet Union lead the way during the Cold War, China has poured billions of dollars into its military-led space programme.
China has already sent two rovers to the Moon. With the second, China became the first country to make a successful soft landing on the far side.
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