China Launches Mission To Mars

China launched a rover to Mars on Thursday, a journey coinciding with a similar US mission as the powers take their rivalry into deep space.

The two countries are taking advantage of a period when Earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a short journey, with the US spacecraft due to lift off on July 30.

The Chinese mission is named Tianwen-1 (“Questions to Heaven”) — a nod to a classical poem that has verses about the cosmos.

Engineers and other employees cheered at the launch site on the southern island of Hainan as it lifted off into blue sky aboard a Long March 5 — China’s biggest space rocket.

Site commander Zhang Xueyu declared the mission a success on state broadcaster CCTV.

The five-tonne Tianwen-1 is expected to arrive in February 2021 after a seven-month, 55-million-kilometre (34-million-mile) voyage.

The mission includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a rover that will study the planet’s soil.

“As a first try for China, I don’t expect it to do anything significant beyond what the US has already done,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

It is a crowded field. The United Arab Emirates launched a probe on Monday that will orbit Mars once it reaches the Red Planet.

But the race to watch is between the United States and China, which has worked furiously to try and match Washington’s supremacy in space.

NASA, the American space agency, has already sent four rovers to Mars since the late 1990s.

The next one, Perseverance, is an SUV-sized vehicle that will look for signs of ancient microbial life, and gather rock and soil samples with the goal of bringing them back to Earth on another mission in 2031.

Tianwen-1 is “broadly comparable to Viking in its scope and ambition”, said McDowell, referring to NASA’s Mars landing missions in 1975-1976.