China unveils first images of 2020 Mars mission

China has unveiled the first images of the designs of a rover it aims to dispatch to Mars in 2020, as part of its ambitious plans to catch up with India, the US, Russia and the EU to reach the Red Planet.

The mission faces “unprecedented” challenges and is designed to explore the planet surface for three months, state media here reported on Wednesday.

China, which became the third nation after the US and the former Soviet Union to put man in the space in 2003, plans to send a spacecraft to orbit Mars, and deploy a rover in July or August 2020, said Zhang Rongqiao, chief architect of the Mars mission.

Images displayed at a press conference yesterday showed a device with six wheels, powered by four solar panels, two more than the rover sent to the moon. Weighing around 200 kg, it is designed to operate for three Martian months, Sun Zezhou, the probe’s chief designer, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

Though China’s space programme has achieved milestones like landing a rover on the Moon and successful manned space mission, but Mars has alluded it.

India’s successful ‘Mangalyaan’ mission - accomplished with a low budget of USD 73 million - caught the attention of China. India became the fourth country after the US, Russia and the EU to successfully send a probe to Mars.

China’s attempts to send exploratory probe Yinghuo-1, in a Russian spacecraft in 2011 failed as shortly after the launch it was declared lost and later burnt during the re-entry.

This is the first time China has revived its Mars mission since then. “The challenges we face are unprecedented,” Ye Peijian, one of China’s leading aerospace experts and a consultant to the programme, said.

The 2020 mission will be launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket, the work horse for China’s space missions. It will be launched from the Wenchang space centre in south China’s Hainan province.

The lander will separate from the orbiter at the end of a journey of around seven months and touch down in a low latitude area in the northern hemisphere of Mars where the rover will explore the surface.The probe will carry 13 payloads, including a remote-sensing camera and a ground penetrating radar - which could be used to study the soil, the environment, and atmosphere of Mars, as well as the planet’s physical fields, the distribution of water and ice, and its inner structure.

A public competition for the name and the logo of the 2020 mission has also been launched. Zhang told people.cn the Mars programme will study the planet’s climate, surface, ionosphere, water ice distribution, internal structure, topography and physical field.

Scientists will have to design a rover that can make its own decisions because the distance between Earth and Mars will cause delays in data transmission, Zhang said.

A favourable alignment of Earth and Mars occurs for only a few weeks every 26 months, and 2020 offers that rare opportunity, National Space Administration director Xu Dazhe said.