China plans to launch a space mission in about four years to bring samples from Mars back to Earth. No country or company has ever managed to do this before. So far, Martian rocks have been examined on the red planet and data from them has been sent to Earth.
“Because Mars is much farther away than the moon, two launches are needed to carry out the sample return mission due to the limited transport capacity of our current rockets,” one of the planners of the project, Liu Jizhong, told the state news agency Xinhua at a conference in Hefei, eastern China. Two “Long March 5” carrier rockets would be used.
China had already sent a rover to Earth’s neighboring planet in 2020 with the Mars mission “Tianwen-1”. This time, the Chinese scientists want to search for life on the red planet and take samples on the surface, in the air and through deep drilling. According to China’s National Space Administration, “Tianwen-3” consists of modules for landing on Mars, ascent from there, a space probe in orbit and a return module.
Highly complex process
Liu expected the mission to be very difficult and challenging. The engineers would have to manage to collect the samples, launch them from Mars in a rocket and connect them to the return module in orbit around the planet – all without contaminating the planet.
It is not yet known exactly where on Mars the probe will land. The mission is scheduled to launch from the Wenchang spaceport on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. The departure date is approximately 2028.
If the mission succeeds, it would be a major space travel success. The US space agency NASA has also had similar plans for a long time. The Mars rover “Perseverance” had even collected rocks for transport. But in April of this year, NASA announced that it would not pursue the plans any further because the costs were too high. It was looking for fresh ideas.
© dpa-infocom, dpa:240906-930-224726/1
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