China just launched their first mission to Mars, Tianwen-1, and it is an ambitious all-up attempt to land a rover and use the orbiter as the data relay back to Earth. If all goes well, which it never has for Russia by the way, then China will be the second country to drive an EV on Mars.
But they are not the only country underway in this new space race. The UAE Hope orbiter launched on Sunday, and the U.S. launches Perseverance next week (the missions cluster like this because the launch window for Mars comes every 26 months, governed by the orbital periods of the planets). Perseverance is a big boy, weighing over 4x as much as Tianwen, and will attempt to fly a helicopter around in the Martian atmosphere for the first time. It will also test conversion of the abundant CO2 in that atmosphere to oxygen.
Tianwen translates as “questions to heaven”.
P.S. I see a funny mistake in this rendering of presumed success… the wheels have the same JPL Morse Code tread as the last U.S. rover! (ref. images below from NASA)
Today’s launch news.
@ JPL
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