China’s Mars spacecraft enters parking lot before landing

According to China, its Tianwen-1 spacecraft has entered a temporary parking orbit around Mars in anticipation of a rover on the red planet in the coming months.

The Chinese National Space Administration said the spacecraft carried out a maneuver in Beijing early Wednesday morning to adjust its orbit and stay in the new orbit for about the next three months before attempting to land. During that time, it will map the surface of Mars and use its cameras and other sensors to gather further data, especially about its intended landing site.

This follows the landing of the American Perseverance rover last Thursday near an ancient river delta in the Jezero crater to look for signs of ancient microscopic life.

A successful attempt to land Tianwen-1 will make China only the second country after the US to place a spacecraft on Mars. China’s solar-powered vehicle, about the size of a golf cart, will collect groundwater data and look for evidence that the planet once had microscopic life.

Tianwen, the title of an ancient poem, means ‘Quest for Heavenly Truth’.

The landing of a spacecraft on Mars is notoriously difficult. About a dozen orbiters missed the point. In 2011, a Chinese orbit around Mars, which was part of a Russian mission, did not remove it from Earth’s orbit.

China’s effort will include parachutes, rockets and airbags. The proposed landing site is a vast, rocky plain called Utopia Planitia, where the American Viking 2 lander hit in 1976.

Tianwen-1’s arrival on Mars on February 10 was preceded by that of a United Arab Emirates orbit. All three of the latest missions were launched in July to take advantage of the close alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only once every two years.

Tianwen-1 is the most ambitious mission to date for China’s mysterious, military-linked space program that orbited an astronaut in 2003 and brought lunar rocks back to Earth for the first time since the 1970s. China was also the first country to land a spacecraft on either side of the moon in 2019.

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China is also building a permanent space station and is planning a lunar mission with crew and a possible permanent research base on the moon, although no dates have been proposed yet.

On Monday, a massive Long March-5B Y2 rocket at the Wenchang spacecraft launch site in Hainan province was moved into place for assembly and testing before naming the Tianhe space station’s core module. The launch is scheduled for the first half of this year, the first of 11 missions planned for the next two years for the construction of the station.

China does not participate in the International Space Station, partly at the insistence of the United States.

The space program is a source of enormous national pride in China and Tianwen-1 has attracted a particularly strong following among the public. Tourists flocked to tropical Hainan Island to watch the launch, while others mocked Mars colonies in desert locations with white domes, aerial locks and spacecraft.

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