China wants Mars rock on Earth by July 2031, and it would like to get there before anyone else. That target was set out in June 2022 by Sun Zezhou, chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission, according to SpaceNews. Space.com relayed the report. Sun’s presentation was reportedly given at a seminar at Nanjing University.
A lean plan
The plan calls for two launches, with liftoff in late 2028 and the return in July 2031. The mission is now known as Tianwen-3, and its launch is still scheduled for 2028 with a return by 2031. SpaceNews described the architecture as simpler than the joint NASA and European Space Agency project, with a single landing and no rovers sampling different sites. Dirt and rock would come from one small area, by surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot.
The American-European effort is more elaborate. It would bring home samples gathered by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has explored the 45-kilometre-wide Jezero Crater since February 2021. A European-built fetch rover would collect them and load them onto an American ascent vehicle, which would launch the container into Mars orbit for a European orbiter to catch. When Sun spoke, NASA had decided to build a second Mars lander because of the mission’s mass requirements. That pushed delivery of its samples to 2033, from 2031, and the agency was asking the public for input.
What China brings to it
Beijing is not starting from nothing. Its Chang’e-5 mission landed on the moon in December 2020 and delivered the first lunar samples since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 did so in 1976. Tianwen-1 launched in July 2020 and reached Mars in February 2021. Its lander and Zhurong rover touched down in May 2021. The orbiter and rover were both still working at the time of Sun’s talk, and Zhurong had entered planned hibernation in May 2022 to survive the Martian winter.
Washington has watched with some unease. In 2021, NASA officials and members of the Biden administration warned that Chinese exploration could threaten American interests. At a virtual Senate hearing in May of that year, NASA chief Bill Nelson twice held up a printed photograph of Zhurong on Mars, saying the Chinese program added a new element to the question of how serious the United States should be about returning humans to the moon.
China has also pushed to raise its profile in the science community. It released a high-resolution global map of the moon in June 2022, and in May it published plans for Tianwen-2, an asteroid sample return mission scheduled to launch in 2025.
