Tianwen-1


Tianwen-1 is an interplanetary mission to Mars by the China National Space Administration to send a robotic spacecraft, which consists of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. The mission was successfully launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on 23 July 2020 with a Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket, and is currently en route to Mars, having flown more than 1.5 million kilometers to date, leaving Earth’s gravitational field, and entering planned interplanetary orbit. Its stated objectives are to search for evidence of both current and past life, and to assess the planet's environment.
The name "Tianwen" comes from the long poem of the same name written by Qu Yuan, one of the greatest poets of ancient China. It is a poem of a series of questions starting with how the universe was created.
Tianwen-1 was the second of three space missions sent toward Mars during the July 2020 Mars launch window, with missions also launched by the national space agencies of the United Arab Emirates and the USA. All three are expected to arrive at Mars in February 2021.

Overview

China's Mars program started in partnership with Russia. In November 2011, the Russian spacecraft Fobos-Grunt, destined for Mars and Phobos, was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Russian spacecraft carried with it an attached secondary spacecraft, the Yinghuo-1, which was intended to become China's first Mars orbiter. However, Fobos-Grunt's main propulsion unit failed to boost the Mars-bound stack from its initial Earth parking orbit and the combined multinational spacecrafts and experiments eventually reentered Earth's atmosphere in January 2012. China subsequently began an independent Mars project and the current mission, which was formally approved by Chinese authorities in early 2016, is the result.
The new Chinese Mars spacecraft, consisting of an orbiter and a lander with an attached rover, is developed by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation and managed by the National Space Science Centre in Beijing. The lander portion of the spacecraft will use a parachute and a retrorocket in order to achieve landing on the Martian surface. If the landing is successful, the lander would then release a rover. This rover will be powered by solar panels and is expected to probe the Martian surface with radar and to perform chemical analyses on the soil; it would also look for biomolecules and biosignatures.

Scientific objectives

The aims of the mission may include the following: find evidence for current and past life, produce Martian surface maps, characterize Martian soil composition and water ice distribution, examine the Martian atmosphere, and in particular, its ionosphere, among others. Simulated Martian landings have been performed as part of mission preparations by the Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity.
The current Mars mission also would serve as a demonstration of technology that will be needed for an anticipated Chinese Mars sample-return mission proposed for the 2030s. There was also a plan that involved using the current mission to cache Martian rock and soil samples for retrieval by the later sample-return mission.

Mission planning

In late 2019, the Xi'an Aerospace Propulsion Institute, a subsidiary of CASC, stated that the performance and control of the future spacecraft's propulsion system has been verified and had passed all requisite pre-flight tests, including tests for hovering, hazard avoidance, deceleration, and landing. The main component of the lander's propulsion system consists of a single engine that provides 7500 newtons of thrust. The spacecraft's supersonic parachute system had also been successfully tested previously.
CNSA initially focused on the Chryse Planitia and on the Elysium Mons regions of Mars in its search for possible landing sites for the lander and its associated rover. However, in September 2019, during a joint meeting in Geneva of the European Planetary Science Congress-Division for Planetary Sciences, Chinese presenters announced that two preliminary sites in the Utopia Planitia region of Mars have instead been chosen for the anticipated landing attempt, with each site having a landing ellipse of approximately 100 by 40 kilometres.
On 23 January 2020, China Youth Daily reported that, according to sources from CASC, the Mars probe will be launched in July 2020 by the Long March 5 Y4 carrier rocket. This was the first time that China has officially announced the month in which the probe will be launched from Earth. The newspaper also reported that the Long March 5 Y4 rocket's hydrogen-oxygen engine has completed a 100-seconds test, which was the last engine test prior to the final assembly of the carrier rocket. It successfully launched on time.

International collaborations

Argentina's CONAE is collaborating on Tianwen-1 by way of a Chinese-run tracking station installed in Las Lajas, Argentina. The facility played a previous role in China's landing of the Chang'e-4 spacecraft on the far side of the moon in January 2019.
France's Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse is collaborating on the Tianwen-1 rover. Sylvestre Maurice of IRAP said, "For their Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy instrument, we have delivered a calibration target that is a French duplicate of a target which is on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. The idea is to see how the two datasets compare."
Austria's Austrian Research Promotion Agency, had been reported to aid in the development of a magnetometer installed on the Chinese Mars orbiter. The Space Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz has confirmed the group's contribution to the Tianwen-1 magnetometer and helped with the calibration of the flight instrument.

Scientific instruments

To achieve the scientific objectives of the mission, the Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover are equipped with 13 instruments:
;Orbiter
;Rover