China - NON-MILITARY space activities & Space Industry
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I think CNSA may concentrate on Tianzhou cargo capsule as priority for now.
LKJ86
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China's First Smart Small Satellite Production Line Ready for Mass Production
China's first smart small satellite production line is ready for mass production in central China's Hubei Province as it turned out its first small satellite weighing less than ton through the smart line on Thursday.
China's first smart small satellite production line is ready for mass production in central China's Hubei Province as it turned out its first small satellite weighing less than ton through the smart line on Thursday.
sheik
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China becomes only second nation in history to land a rover on Mars
The landing is a major milestone for China's space agency, which has advanced rapidly in just a few decades.
China becomes only second nation in history to land a rover on Mars
The landing is a major milestone for China's space agency, which has advanced rapidly in just a few decades.
May 14, 2021, 8:53 PM EDT / Updated May 14, 2021, 9:27 PM EDT
By Tim Fitzsimons
After several months orbiting Mars, a Chinese rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface Friday, making China the second nation, after the United States, to achieve a soft landing on the red planet.
The rover, named Zhurong after the Chinese god of fire, is part of China's Tianwen-1 mission, which launched in July 2020. The landing is a major milestone for China's space agency, which has advanced rapidly in just a few decades.
Few details about the Tianwen-1 mission have been made public, but the Mars probe and its accompanying rover are designed to map the Martian surface and search for signs of life on the planet.
The China National Space Administration said in a statement Friday that the Tianwen-1 spacecraft "has functioned normally" since it's launch last year and has collected a "huge amount of scientific data."
The Zhurong rover landed Friday shortly after 7 p.m. ET in a region of Mars known as Utopia Planitia. The vast, icy plain was also where NASA's now-defunct Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, congratulated China's space agency shortly after the landing was confirmed. "Together with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity's understanding of the Red Planet," he wrote on Twitter.
China's Tianwen-1 mission is a key part of the country's lofty ambitions for space exploration. In December 2020, a Chinese probe landed on the moon and subsequently returned to Earth with a cache of lunar samples. As a result, China became only the third country, after the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, to accomplish such a feat.
In late April, China launched into orbit the first module for a planned space station. Rocket debris from that launch later fell back to Earth, crashing into the Indian Ocean and drawing criticism from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and others over China's handling of the incident.
This year has been one for Mars missions. In addition to China's Zhurong rover, the red planet is playing host to several other new spacecraft. NASA's Perseverance rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface on Feb. 18 and officially began collecting science data this week. Previously, the rover served as a communications base for a tiny experimental helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, which conducted the first powered, controlled flights on another planet.
In February, the United Arab Emirates' Hope probe also entered into orbit around Mars, making the UAE only the fifth nation or entity to do so. The spacecraft is designed to circle Mars and study the red planet's atmosphere.
sheik
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China’s Mars Rover Mission Lands on the Red Planet
The announcement from state media suggests the country is now only the second country to put a working spacecraft on the Martian surface.
China’s Mars Rover Mission Lands on the Red Planet
The announcement from state media suggests the country is now only the second country to put a working spacecraft on the Martian surface.
An artist’s concept of the Chinese lunar probe and lander released by the Chinese state space agency in 2016.Credit...Xinhua, via Associated Press
By Steven Lee Myers and Kenneth Chang
May 14, 2021Updated 9:44 p.m. ET
The United States now has company on Mars.
A Chinese spacecraft descended through the thin Martian atmosphere and landed safely on a large plain on Saturday morning, state media reported, accomplishing a feat that only two other nations have before. (In the United States, it was still Friday— 7:18 p.m. Eastern time — when the spacecraft touched down.)
The landing follows China’s launch last month of the core module of a new orbiting space station and a successful mission in December that collected nearly four pounds of rocks and soil from the moon and brought them back to Earth. Next month, the country’s space program plans to send three astronauts back to space, inaugurating what could become a regular Chinese presence in Earth’s orbit.
Just by arriving at Mars and orbiting the planet in February, China’s space program confirmed its place among the top tier of agencies exploring the solar system. Now that it has executed a landing — with a deployment of a rover still to come — it has established itself as a principal contender in what some view as a new era of space competition.
The Global Times, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, said that the mission had “spectacularly conquered a new major milestone” with its landing.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, offered his congratulations to the Chinese. “Together with the global science community, I look forward to the important contributions this mission will make to humanity’s understanding of the Red Planet,” he wrote on Twitter.
Until Friday, the China National Space Administration had said little about its plans for the landing, in keeping with its usual secrecy involving operations. The news of the impending landing, however, began to spill out on social media and in official news reports, signaling that the landing was imminent.
“Stargazers from all over the world have now turned their heads once again to Mars,” The Global Times wrote. A user on Weibo, the popular social media platform, reposted the nine photographs that Tianwen had so far transmitted.
In a virtual conference organized by Weibo on Friday, several scientists debated the reasons to explore Mars, with one saying that the planet’s evolution could hold lessons for changes happening on Earth now.
“The purpose is to better protect our Earth itself,” Jiao Weixin, a professor of geophysics at Peking University, said in the forum. “I think this is the most fundamental purpose of our deep space exploration.”
The Chinese space agency has also highlighted international collaboration on the Tianwen-1 mission including contributions from the Europe Space Agency, Argentina, France and Austria.
What is China’s mission to Mars?
The Tianwen-1 mission launched from Earth last July, aiming to take advantage of the window of time every two years when Mars and Earth are closest together during their voyages around the sun.
The mission consists of an orbiter, a lander and a rover.
The Tianwen-1 Spacecraft
China’s mission to Mars features a probe that will land on the planet with help from a parachute.
By Eleanor Lutz | Source: China National Space Administration and China Central Television
The Tianwen-1 orbiter pulled into Martian orbit on Feb. 10; since then, it has been circling at a safe distance, preparing for the landing attempt.
The unnamed landing craft carries a rover, which was named Zhurong after a god of fire in Chinese folk tales. That name beat out nine other semifinalists that were announced in February.
The mass of Zhurong is about 240 kilograms, or about 530 pounds. That is a bit heftier than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that NASA landed on Mars in 2004, but only about one-fourth the mass of the two currently operating NASA Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance.
It will be days after the touchdown that the rover rolls off the lander. Like Spirit and Opportunity, Zhurong will be powered by solar panels. For Perseverance and Curiosity, nuclear batteries turn heat released by the decay of radioactive plutonium into electricity.
The rover’s seven instruments include cameras, ground-penetrating radar, a magnetic field detector and a weather station.
This was not China’s first attempt at a Mars mission. That was Yinghuo-1, which failed nearly 10 years ago, although through no fault of the country’s own. That spacecraft burned up in Earth’s atmosphere when the Russian rocket it was traveling on failed in flight.
Where did the rover land and what will it study?
It landed in Utopia Planitia, or Nowhere Land Plain, a huge basin a couple of thousand miles wide in the northern hemisphere that was most likely carved out by a meteor impact. The same region was visited by NASA’s Viking 2 lander in 1976.
The plains are part of the northern lowlands of Mars. If there was once bountiful water on the red planet a few billion years ago, this region could have been underwater, part of an ocean covering the upper part of the planet. Utopia Planitia lies lower than features that have been proposed as two sets of shorelines, remnants from such early Martian oceans.
Some of the water from that hypothesized ocean may once have percolated underground, still frozen there today. In 2016, scientists using a radar instrument on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter concluded there is indeed much ice there — as much water as Lake Superior spread over an area bigger than New Mexico.
One goal of the Tianwen-1 mission is to better understand the distribution of ice in this region, which future human colonists on Mars could use to sustain themselves.
How did the rover land on Mars?
Testing a prototype lander in Huailai, Hebei province in 2019.Credit...Andy Wong/Associated Press
Landing on the red planet is perilous — NASA engineers refer to it as seven minutes of terror when its rovers, most recently Perseverance, arrive.
Because Tianwen-1 was already in orbit around Mars, its incoming speed was not quite as fast as Perseverance’s. Thus, China’s lander required a bit of extra terror — nine minutes — for the landing, The Global Times reported on Friday, citing experts. The probe was also operating on its own, as signals currently take 17 minutes 42 seconds to travel between Mars and Earth.
Spacecraft descend toward Mars at a high speed, and the thin atmosphere does not do enough to slow the trip to the ground. The shock waves of air compressed by the speeding capsule generate extreme heat that must be absorbed or dissipated. A number of Soviet, NASA and European missions have crashed.
Only NASA has reached the surface of Mars intact more than once. The landings of its largest rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, have relied on parachutes to slow the spacecraft, shields to dissipate the heat from atmospheric friction and intricate systems called sky cranes. These were basically rocket-powered jetpacks carrying the rovers beneath them and lowering them to the surface on cables before flying safely away from the landing zone.
The Global Times reported that Tianwen-1 probe lowered its altitude from its parking orbit before its lander-rover combination separated with the orbiter at around 4 p.m. Friday Eastern time. (In China it was 4 a.m. Saturday.)
The orbiter then rose and returned to its parking orbit about half an hour after the separation, to provide relay communication for the landing craft combo, the Chinese space agency told The Global Times. The lander-rover combination circled Mars for another three hours before its entry into the Mars atmosphere en route to landing.
For the Tianwen mission, a cone-shaped entry capsule carried the lander and rover through the atmosphere. A heat shield protected the spacecraft from superheated gases as it sped through the top of the atmosphere. Then the friction of the thin Martian air helped it slow down — by about 90 percent, Tan Zhiyun, a designer at the China Academy of Space Technology, told The Global Times.
At a lower altitude, the heat shield was jettisoned. At the next step the parachute and the top nose-shaped piece were discarded. Firing a rocket engine, the four-legged lander, similar in design to the Chang’e-3 and Chang’e-4 lunar landers, then hovered briefly as it searched for a safe spot and descended toward a safe powered landing.
sheik
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China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars
The six-wheeled robot has made the hazardous descent to the surface of the Red Planet, China announces.
www.bbc.com
China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars
Artwork of the Zhurong robot: It's a daunting prospect landing on Mars
China has successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars, state media announced early on Saturday.
The six-wheeled Zhurong robot was targeting Utopia Planitia, a vast terrain in the planet's northern hemisphere.
The vehicle used a combination of a protective capsule, a parachute and a rocket platform to make the descent.
The successful touchdown is a remarkable achievement, given the difficult nature of the task.
Only the Americans have really mastered landing on Mars until now. With this landing, China becomes the second country to put a rover on Mars.
Since its arrival, the Tianwen-1 orbiter has been busy mapping the planet's surface
- China succeeds in putting a probe in Mars orbit
- UAE space mission returns first image of Mars
- Remarkable photo of Mars rover during landing
The time since has been spent surveying Utopia, taking high-resolution images to pinpoint the safest place to put down.
The aim with all such ventures is to pick a spot, as far as possible, that is devoid of imposing craters and large boulders.
This model shows Zhurong to have a similar look to Nasa's Spirit and Opportunity vehicles
Chinese engineers have to follow events with a time lag.
The current distance to Mars is 320 million km, which means radio messages take almost 18 minutes to reach Earth.
Every stage of the Zhurong's approach to the surface therefore has to be managed autonomously.
The entry (into the atmosphere), descent and landing strategy follows a familiar architecture.
At the chosen moment, the rover, encased in an aeroshell, is released from the Tianwen orbiter and dives downwards.
The name's significance: Zhurong is the god of fire in ancient Chinese mythology
A heatshield on the capsule slows the fall by pushing up against the Martian air. A parachute then opens to reduce the velocity still further. Finally, the robot breaks away on a rocket-powered bench for the manoeuvres that take it to the ground.
It is a daunting challenge, but China has shown great competence of late in its space endeavours, which have included putting two rovers on the Moon.
Now that Zhurong has got down successfully, scientists will try to get at least 90 Martian days of service out of it, studying the local geology. A day, or Sol, on Mars lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes.
The robot looks a lot like the American space agency's (Nasa) Spirit and Opportunity vehicles from the 2000s. It weighs some 240kg and is powered by fold-out solar panels.
A tall mast carries cameras to take pictures and aid navigation; five additional instruments will help assess the mineralogy of local rocks and look for any water-ice below ground.
samsara
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I do agree. I hope all posters will post NON-MILITARY space activities at the "China Space Industry"
incl all the Moon, Mars, Space Station, Manned Spaceflight & Cargo Spaceflight and other outer space activities (comets, asteroids, Xuntian space telescope, etc).
@Deino, may you please help to relocate the latest posts to the more appropriate designated thread, thanks.
LKJ86
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China prepares to launch Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft
Source: Xinhua | 2021-05-16 12:58:06 | Editor: huaxia
WENCHANG, Hainan, May 16 (Xinhua) -- The combination of the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft and the Long March-7 Y3 carrier rocket has been transported to the launching area of the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province on Sunday, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).
The facilities and equipment at the launch site are in good condition, while various pre-launch function checks and joint tests will be carried out as planned, the CMSA said.
Source: Xinhua | 2021-05-16 12:58:06 | Editor: huaxia
WENCHANG, Hainan, May 16 (Xinhua) -- The combination of the Tianzhou-2 cargo spacecraft and the Long March-7 Y3 carrier rocket has been transported to the launching area of the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in south China's Hainan Province on Sunday, according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).
The facilities and equipment at the launch site are in good condition, while various pre-launch function checks and joint tests will be carried out as planned, the CMSA said.
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