China intends to bring in samples from Mars two years ahead of the effort currently being jointly planned by the Americans and Europeans. If that’s not a clear sign that we have a new space race underway, I don’t know what is.
The revelation came as a surprise during a presentation last Monday (20) by Sun Zezhou, chief designer of the Chinese mission Tianwen-1, which last year took an orbiter, a lander and a rover to the red planet. . That the Chinese were planning a Martian sample return for the future of their program was already known. But the architecture and timeline were unknown, until now.
The effort will be simpler than the combined initiative of NASA and ESA, American and European space agencies. Strictly speaking, for these two, the sample return mission has already begun with the American rover Perseverance, which is collecting carefully chosen Martian material and putting it in tubes. A future mission would take a new rover to Mars to harvest these tubes and place them on a rocket, to be installed on the Martian surface by a lander. The rover would then take a capsule into orbit around Mars, which would rendezvous with a European-launched mothership in 2027, capable of propelling itself back to Earth, returning with the precious samples in 2033.
The Chinese plan is simpler and exploits recent successes of the program, such as the successful return of lunar samples with Chang’e-5 (2020) and Tianwen-1’s own Martian landing system. There will only be two launches: one will take a mothership to Martian orbit for the return, and the other, a landing and ascent module capable of collecting samples with some mobility, potentially involving a robot with four legs.
The ascension module, for the takeoff on Mars, would have two stages, enough to reach an orbital speed of 16,200 km/h and make the encounter with the mother ship (the red planet is less massive than Earth, so that the speed required to reach orbit is less than the approximately 27,000 km/h required here).
Landing on Mars would take place in September 2029, departure from Martian orbit would take place in October 2030 and the samples return to Earth in July 2031 – two years earlier than expected for rocks currently being harvested by Perseverance.
The return of samples from Mars is considered one of the most ambitious goals of space exploration today – the most reliable means of trying to know whether or not there was life in the red planet’s past – and China alone has managed to do that in front of Americans and Europeans will definitely light up a lot of little red lights. But, of course, for now it’s just a plan. And, as the Chinese tend to play cards very close to their chests, we will only know if this schedule will hold when we are closer to the launches.
This column is published on Mondays, in Folha Corrida.
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