WRITTEN BY DR MICHAEL SALLA ON APRIL 27, 2020. POSTED IN FEATURED, SPACE PROGRAMS
China is on schedule to launch an orbiter and rover to Mars in July 2020 in a mission called Tianwen-1 – meaning ‘questions to heaven’. While the mission goals for Tianwen-1 appear very mundane – mapping the surface and extracting soil samples – one of the “questions to heaven” that the Chinese are very interested in answering is: “are multiple insider accounts of a German space colony that moved to Mars from Antarctica in the 1950s/1960s true?”
Andrew Jones from SpaceNews explains what to expect with the Tianwen-1 mission:
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.
The roughly 240-kilogram solar-powered rover is nearly twice the mass of China’s Yutu lunar rovers. It will carry a ground-penetrating radar, multispectral camera, a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy instrument and payloads for detecting the climate and magnetic environment. The rover has a mission design lifetime of three Earth months. The rover will receive a name through a public vote closer to launch.
The Chinese orbiter and rover will provide independent data to answer many questions Chinese researchers have about Mars in terms of its ancient history and life, without relying on third parties such as NASA and the European Space Agency, which are well known to disseminate disinformation. (READ MORE)