Map indicating two preliminary landing areas for China’s 2020 Mars rover presented at the sessions of COPUOS in Vienna, Austria in June 2018.
Credit: CNSA
Posted on 04/25/2020 10:14:46 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Tianwen-1, meaning ‘questions to heaven’, is taken from the name of a long-form poem by Qu Yuan, a poet born in the fourth century B.C., according to CNSA chief engineer Ge Xiaochun.
China is understood to be planning a Mars sample return mission, a Jupiter orbiter and considering possible missions to icy giants and interstellar space. A joint near-Earth asteroid sample return and comet rendezvous mission has also been proposed.
Few details of the Tianwen-1 mission have been released so far. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft is expected to have a wet mass of around 5 metric tons. Launch on a Long March 5 launcher is expected from Wenchang early in the short launch window to Mars open in late July and early August.
The YF-77 liquid oxygen-liquid hydrogen engines for the Long March 5 passed tests in January. The same engines were the cause of the failure of the second Long March 5 launch in 2017.
Comprehensive software and hardware tests of the spacecraft were completed in March. The spacecraft has apparently been delivered to Wenchang Satellite Launch Center.
The test launch of the Long March 5B—currently expected in early May—will likely need to succeed for the Tianwen-1 mission to proceed. Following that mission, the Yuanwang-21 and -22 cargo vessels will collect the components of the Long March 5 for Tianwen-1 from Tianjin, north China, for delivery to Wenchang on the southern island of Hainan.
The Tianwen-1 orbiter will be equipped with a high-resolution camera comparable to HiRise on board NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It also carries a medium-resolution camera, subsurface radar, mineralogy spectrometer, neutral and energetic particle analyzers and a magnetometer. The orbiter will also play a relay role for the mission rover.
(Excerpt) Read more at spacenews.com ...
May the CCP meet the GGG.
Mars or spread over China
why should China be allowed to contaminate
another planet with their SAR_CoV-2?
they already destroyed Earth.
Made in China is now becoming an albatross around the World. Like I keep repeating, America should be giving tax incentives and even direct funding to bring our manufacturing home like Japan is doing. After their lying about COVID-19, I really can't see how the dem/socialists can justify against such an incentive.
All this courtesy of Clinton/Loral. Ugh!
Maybe they intend to unleash alien bugs.
Al kidding aside, "backward contamination" is taken seriously by NASA, and we all know now what slobs the Chinese are about health & safety.
May it brow up on the raunching pad.
bttt
Prediction: Mysteriously fails to make orbit.
Didn’t think of that.
During the Apollo era, one of the missions brought back parts of a probe that had landed some time before. NASA was able to revive staph bacteria that hitched a ride on the original craft, surviving the alternating periods of heat, UV, solar winds, and extreme cold for 18 months or more.
Standards were developed after that to minimize transporting Earth bacteria around the solar system.
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