China aims to launch a rover to Mars on Thursday on a journey that coincides with a similar US mission as the powers take their rivalry to deep space.
The two countries are taking advantage of a period when Earth and Mars are closer to sending their probes, with the China mission taking off on Saturday and the US spacecraft on July 30.
It will be a field full of people. The UAE launched a probe on Monday that will orbit Mars once it reaches the Red Planet.
But the race to see is between the United States and China, which has worked hard to try to match Washington's supremacy in space.
The Chinese mission has been named Tianwen-1 ("Questions to Heaven") in a nod to a classic poem that has verses about the cosmos.
China's largest space rocket is expected to launch on Thursday, March 5, from the southern island of Hainan, depending on the weather.
Tianwen-1 is expected to arrive in February 2021 after a journey of seven months and 55 million kilometers (34 million miles).
The mission includes a Mars orbiter, a lander, and a scout vehicle that will study the planet's soil.
"As a first attempt for China, I don't expect it to do anything significant beyond what the United States has already done," said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The United States has already sent four rovers to Mars since the late 1990s.
The next, Perseverance, is an SUV-sized vehicle that will search for signs of ancient microbial life and collect samples of rocks and dirt with the goal of bringing them back to Earth on another mission in 2031.
The Chinese mission is similar to NASA's Viking missions in 1975-1976 in that it has an orbiter and a lander, McDowell said.
Tianwen-1 is "broadly comparable to Viking in scope and ambition," he added.
Reaching
After seeing the United States and the Soviet Union lead the way during the Cold War, China has invested billions of dollars into its military-led space program.
From NDTV News - Topstories https://ift.tt/2ZU5DWR
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