BEIJING (AP) – A Chinese spacecraft went into orbit around Mars on Wednesday on an expedition to land a rover on the surface and look for signs of ancient life, authorities announced in a milestone in the U.S. most ambitious deep-space mission to date.
The arrival of Tianwen-1 after a seven-month and nearly 300 million miles (475 million kilometers) journey is part of an unusual burst of activity on Mars: a United Arab Emirates spacecraft swung into orbit around the red planet on Tuesday . and an American robber will arrive next week.
The Chinese space agency said the five-ton combination orbiter and rover fired its engine to reduce its speed, allowing it to be caught by Martian gravity.
“Entering orbit has been successful … making it our country’s first artificial Mars satellite,” the agency announced.
The mission is daring even for a space program that has amassed a steady stream of achievements and brought prestige to China’s ruling Communist Party.
If all goes to plan, the rover will detach from the spacecraft and land safely on Mars in a few months, making China only the second country to achieve such a feat. The rover, a solar-powered vehicle the size of a golf cart, will collect data on underground water and search for evidence that the planet once experienced microscopic life.
Tianwen, the title of an old poem, means ‘Quest for Heavenly Truth’.
Landing a spacecraft on Mars is notoriously difficult. Destroyed Russian and European spacecraft litter the landscape along with a failed American lander. About a dozen orbiters missed the target. In 2011, a Mars-bound Chinese orbiter that was part of a Russian mission failed to leave Earth.
Only the US has landed successfully on Mars – eight times, starting with two Viking missions in the 1970s. An American lander and rover are in use today.
China’s attempt will involve a parachute, missile firing and airbags. The proposed landing site is a vast, rock-strewn plain called Utopia Planitia, where the American Viking 2 lander landed in 1976.
Before the arrival of the Chinese spacecraft and the UAE orbiter this week, six other spacecraft were already operating around Mars: three American, two European and one Indian.
All three of the latest missions launched in July to take advantage of the close alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only once every two years.
A NASA rover called Perseverance is aiming for a landing on Feb. 18. It will also look for signs of ancient microscopic life and collect rocks that will be returned to Earth in about a decade.
China’s secret military-linked space program has had a series of successes. In December, it returned moon rocks to Earth for the first time since the 1970s. China was also the first country to land a spacecraft on the little-explored far side of the moon in 2019.
China is also building a permanent space station and planning a manned lunar mission and a possible permanent moon research base, although no dates have yet been proposed.
Although most contacts with NASA are blocked by Congress and China is not a participant in the International Space Station, it is increasingly collaborating with the European Space Agency and countries such as Argentina, France and Austria. Early on, China collaborated with the Soviet Union and then with Russia.