Jubilee Post News & Views
Special Desk
While the world is focusing on whether the covid-19 virus is Chinese or not, China claimed to have successfully put its Tianwen-1 mission in orbit around Mars.
It’s the first time the country has managed to get a spacecraft to the Red Planet and comes a day after the United Arab Emirates accomplished the same feat. Tianwen-1, or “Questions to Heaven”, comprises an orbiter and a rover.
Engineers will bide their time before despatching the wheeled robot to the surface but the expectation is that this will happen in May or June. Orbit insertion underlines again the rapid progress China’s space programme is making.
Tianwen-1 rover looks a lot like the US robots of the 2000s. It follows December’s impressive mission to retrieve rock and soil samples from Earth’s Moon – by any measure a very complex undertaking. Tianwen-1’s mission, particularly the surface element, will be no less challenging.
Its five-tonne spacecraft stack, made up of orbiter and rover, was launched from Wenchang spaceport in July, and travelled nearly half a billion km to rendezvous with the Red Planet.
Engineers had planned a 14-minute braking burn on the orbiter’s 3,000-newton thruster, with the expectation that this would reduce its 23km/s velocity sufficiently to allow capture by Mars’ gravity.
The manoeuvre was automated. Radio commands currently take 11 minutes to traverse the 190 million kilometres, separating Earth from Mars. It should have put Tianwen-1 in an initial large ellipse that comes in as close as 400km from the surface and out as far as 180,000km.
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China is following the strategy employed by the Americans for their successful Viking landers in the mid-1970s. A period of reconnaissance will now follow but Tianwen-1’s primary choice for a touchdown is a flat plain within the Utopia impact basin just north of Mars’ equator.
